Inappropriate

Lie to us if you have to, but please do not take us for fools.

Sonny Coloma needs to have two mouths to be fully fit to deal with the situation brought about by Bong Revilla’s revelations. The first mouth will say: the President asked the senator to vote according to the merits of the case. The second mouth will say: impeachment is a political, not judicial, process.

The first mouth is impertinent, to be sure. What arrogance drove the Chief Executive to have a Senator of the Republic brought to him, chauffeured surreptitiously by his presumptive successor no less, only to tell them to act according to his best lights. Why was Bong Revilla not insulted by this patronizing? As a senator of the realm, he is always expected to act according to his best lights.

The second mouth, for its part, is truly blatant. If impeachment is a political game, who cares about the merits of the case? This is all a matter of arm-twisting and horse-trading. Bong Revilla is not being fully truthful in failing to discuss the trade-off in this political tryst.

The information about Bong Revilla being put in the back seat in an unmarked vehicle driven by Mar Roxas is not new. That circulated in the political grapevine almost immediately after it happened.

When that information first circulated, few were surprised. To say that President Aquino was an interested party in the Corona impeachment is to make an understatement. Aquino was obsessed with taking out Corona. Because of that, propriety hardly mattered.

Revilla and Estrada represented swing votes in the Senate. They surely needed some talking to. The two senators should stop acting like political virgins, repeating crap about voting according to their best lights. We now know the former chief justice was removed for at least fifty million reasons.

For their part, the President and his supplemental mouthpieces should not try too hard portraying the clandestine meetings with the swing-vote senators as anything other than an arm-twisting session. The more they try, the thinner their story becomes.

For instance, Aquino has this intriguing story that Revilla was called to breakfast because of concern the senators were being “pressured” by certain unnamed interest groups. In the President’s mind, the solution to this seems to be to pressure the swing-vote senators from the other end.

If the Palace wants to kill this story about clandestine breakfasts with the President, all that needs to be done is have Mar Roxas take the blame. When he fussed about Janet Napoles’ detention quarters last year, many thought Roxas confused his job as interior secretary with that of interior designer. By arranging to chauffeur senators, the former transportation secretary might have misunderstood that other job as well.

Some lawyers, such as former Sandiganbayan presiding justice Edilberto Sandoval, think Aquino committed an offence meeting the senator-judges on the eve of a verdict. But can we really afford another impeachment exercise, along with the millions of reasons senator-judges require?

Nah, log this as just another instance of inappropriate behavior in a season where political leaders have simply lost their class.

Vote-rich

Perhaps this time, the President might consider inviting the bids and awards committee of the DOTC to his official residence for breakfast. That agency needs some talking to as well to upgrade their political sensibility.

You see, the DOTC did something truly impolitic lately. They awarded the contract for modernizing the Mactan Cebu International Airport to an Indian company with an unimpressive track record. This is almost a guarantee the new terminal will be second-rate.

Cebuanos are up in arms over this. The new airport is vital to the region’s booming tourism. It will, potentially, be the major port of entry to the country.

Yet, the winning design, according to the angry Cebuanos, looks like a “chicken house.” This “chicken house” is increasingly seen as another degrading imposition from Imperial Manila.

The second-ranking bidder, one of several taipans originating from Cebu, formally complained of conflict of interest involving the winning bidder GMR Infrastructure and Malaysian Airports Holdings Berhad (part of the Lopez-led consortium). The DOTC bidding rules takes conflicts of interest seriously, imposing the penalty of outright disqualification for this.

The matter is being seriously considered in the post-qualification process. Meanwhile, Cebuanos are busy making their objections known. They do not want a cheap and ugly airport terminal to service what is really the country’s tourism center of gravity. They do not want to compete with Manila for “most hated airport” status. They want something more respectable, more state-of-the-art.

For those looking at the 2016 elections with a moist eye, Cebuano opinion on infra decisions that will affect their lives is not to be ignored.

Cebu, after all, is the most vote-rich province in the country. The province, in the last elections, had 2.41 million votes. Where Cebu goes, so goes the rest of the Visayas and Cebuano-speaking Mindanao. The province itself has a respectable history for defying parties in power.

Decisions taken about the Mactan airport ought to be more sensitive to Cebuano opinion. It is, after all, their airport.

If government is seen as insensitive to local opinion, the matter of a new Mactan terminal could cause a strong political backlash, manifesting in the 2006 elections. Recall how a strong Cebu vote enabled the Visayas to surmount the trend in Luzon and Mindanao in the 2004 elections.

Surely, this administration, so obsessed with extending its political control, will not want Cebuano opinion to turn adverse.