Whether it’s a smoking gun or a dud: We’ve got to have a look at it - BY THE WAY by Max V. Soliven

The Senators are scheduled to hold a "caucus" today on the "Valhalla" Equitable PCIBank records still sealed in their envelope. The 64-dollar (or is it $64 million?) question is whether the Senators will abide by the ruling made last Friday by Chief Justice Hilario Davide, Jr., that the submitted bank records in that sealed envelope be opened and subjected to scrutiny.

If enough Senators object to the "opening" of those records, they can muster a vote to overrule the Davide ruling before the impeachment trial resumes at 2 p.m. today. Let’s see what they’ll do.

What has pricked the curiosity and focused the attention of the public on those bank documents allegedly pertaining to a "Jose Valhalla" or "Jose Velarde" is the fact that President Estrada’s defense lawyers have been vehemently opposing opening the envelope. Though perhaps impressed with legal merit, the arguments raised against the unsealing of that envelope and the viewing of its contents are widely seen as attempts to prevent the disclosure of possibly incriminating documents – and, worse, to "hide" the truth.

Many are asking: If the documents are not incriminating, how come the vigorous opposition being put up by Erap’s lawyers to their being made public, or even "shown" to the House prosecution panel? It has already been the acerbic comment of Ateneo Law School Dean, Father Joaquin Bernas, S.J., that "considering the intensity with which the defense in the Estrada trial is fighting to keep the seal on the Equitable Bank envelope unbroken, one can only suspect or even conclude that there is enough dynamite there to blow the President out of Malacañang!"

The only way to counter such remarks and the almost universal suspicion provoked by the antics of the defense panel is to put the documents on public display. Chief Justice Davide is right. If any Senators strive today to upend his ruling, we’ll know where their sympathies lie.

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The vigorous opposition to the disclosure of the "Valhalla" documents (Do they signal, as in Nordic legend, "The Twilight of the gods"?) calls to mind the stubborn refusal of US President Richard M. Nixon to release the so-called "Watergate tapes" from the clandestine archives of the White House. The controversy referred to the sixty-four White House tapes of Watergate discussions (63 of them between Nixon himself and key aides) which were demanded by Special Watergate Prosecutor Leon Jaworski.

Nixon had to be ordered by the United States Supreme Court to release the incriminating tapes. In a unanimous decision penned by Chief Justice Warren Burger, the Court said that the President had no right to withhold evidence in criminal proceedings. Mind you, Chief Justice Burger had been Nixon’s personal choice to succeed Chief Justice Earl Warren.

Nixon was stunned by the ruling which he had realized all along would have a detrimental influence on the course of the impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives. When he was informed over the phone of the bad news by his Chief of Staff (General) Alexander Haig, Nixon asked: "Unanimous?"

Haig replied: "Unanimous. There is no air in it at all." Nixon desperately asked: "None at all?" to which Haig sadly replied: "It’s tight as a drum."

Nixon’s assistant, Fred Buzhardt, later confided to Haig that the tapes Nixon had been ordered to hand over to Jaworski constituted the "smoking gun" of the impeachment trial. Rather than continue to fight, Nixon decided to resign from the presidency.

I’m not – not at all – trying to strike a comparison between the Nixon "Watergate Cover-up" tapes and the Equitable Bank and PCIBank documents inside the sealed envelope. Nor am I saying that, like the White House tapes, those bank documents, of whose contents I am completely ignorant, constitute a "smoking gun" in the current impeachment trial. That’s precisely what we’d like to see – whether there’s smoke.

I trust that Chief Justice Davide, as presiding officer of the Senate Impeachment body, will not reconsider his Friday ruling and reverse himself. If he stands pat on it, but some Senators seek to overturn it, could the issue be elevated to the Supreme Court, just as Nixon refusal was elevated to the US High Tribunal? If elevated to the High Court, would the respondent be Chief Justice Davide himself, as presiding officer of the Senate impeachment body, or the Senate in toto? One thing is clear: we’re sailing in uncharted waters packed with legal booby traps and magnetic mines, without the comfort and protection of a minesweeper. And lawyers are having a field day.

Incidentally, we’ve recounted before the reaction of the late President Ferdinand Marcos when he learned that the US Supreme Court had forced Nixon to surrender his tapes. "If I were Nixon," Marcos had reportedly quipped, "I would have burned down the White House, then asked Jaworski and the Supreme Court: ‘What tapes?’ "

What house would President Estrada have to burn to clear himself? Don’t laugh. That’s only a joke.

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What? A national budget of P715 BILLION for the Year 2001?

Former Finance Secretary (and Customs Commissioner) Pio de Roda told me the other day that he distinctly remembers the newspaper headlines on the date he was appointed Acting Secretary of Finance in 1970 by President Marcos. The banner headline in one daily indignantly sputtered: "P3 BILLION NATIONAL BUDGET: SCANDALOUS!" Nowadays when it comes to profligate government spending, three billion pesos is no longer "scandalous." It’s petty cash.

But those were the days, I also distinctly remember, when you could buy a Mami-Siopao from that great Quiapo landmark, the eatery of Ma Mon Luk, for only one peso. (A siopao espesyal would cost fifty centavos.)

Ma Mon Luk was a "crony" of a top-ranking government officials and newsmen, but his only "bribe" was an occasional free mami-siopao. When I was a reporter up to the time I was Business Editor, he used to visit the editorial newsrooms of The Manila Times and our sister afternoon daily, The Daily Mirror, in the TVT building on Florentino Torres st. (Sta. Cruz) with baskets of steaming siopao every Christmas, to be welcomed by our Editors-in-Chief Joe Bautista (grandfather of Sen. Loren Legarda) and Dave Boguslav, Editors Jose Luna Castro, O.O. Sta. Romana, and Pocholo Romualdez, and all of us staffers, since he invariably handed out cards saying: "This entitles bearer to one Free Mami-Siopao."

This type of low-key "payola" paid off. When one of his customers, the late President Ramon Magsaysay, died, lo and behold, the influential Times (we were the biggest newspaper in those days) ran a front page photograph of, would you believe, Mr. Ma Mon Luk at the bier of the President. If I remember right, the caption read: "Ma Mon Luk Pays Last Respects to Fallen Leader."

Those were simpler and more heartfelt days, I can say in retrospect, with not much malice going around. I miss those siopaos of old, whipped up by that wizard Ma Mon Luk. Let's not forget that wonderful sauce! His children tried to live up to his legacy, but they never recaptured, alas, the flavor and taste of his Mami-Siopao.

I can close my eyes and savor them now. Nostalgia is not always in the heart – often, too, it’s in the tongue.

Believe me, I’ve searched this planet for an equivalent of that fantastic siopao, and found it not even in Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Canton or Xiamen.

The closest thing to it I discovered in New York’s Chinatown on Mott and Bayard, which is why, whenever I land at JFK or in Newark, before going to my hotel, I make a beeline for Chinatown. In a dingy little hole-in-the-wall called the Lai Wa, you’ll find not only "regular" siopao but "baked" siopao and the best coffee in town (in a paper cup). The Filipinos in the Big Apple and nearby New Jersey know it well: They call the place "La-way." Mouth-watering, that’s true enough.

Merry Christmas!