Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio has exposed herself as completely unfit for any elective position by refusing to testify at the House panels on appropriations and good government, ignoring basic courtesy to the legislative branch and shunning the power of the purse vested in Congress.
There is Sara’s visceral fear of being questioned for the anomalous disbursements of the Office of the Vice President (OVP), and her performance in previous budget hearings showed she was utterly unprepared to defend her budget and had to rely on Atty. Zuleika Lopez and others to respond. What happened last year has been repeated this year, lending credence to the observation that she was pushed up to a position of irrelevance.
Yet, she appeared on the hearing of the House committee on good government, not to respond to the questions raised by the privilege speech of Manila Rep. Rolando Valeriano, who asked pointedly asked why the OVP had social services programs aimed at Metro Manila residents. More to the point, the lawmaker asked Sara to produce the list of the supposed 977,615 beneficiaries of such programs and find out whether they are genuine or not. Valeriano is duty-bound to ask those questions as chairs the House panel on Metro Manila development. Naughty minds would find malice in them and Sara did, accusing the legislator of engaging in empty talk even as she fumed while addressing the panel by reading a sophomoric address prepared by her publicist.
She practically condemned the committee for not doing its job and engaging in a conspiracy to impeach her at the bidding of her purported nemesis—Speaker Ferdinand Martin Romualdez—and appropriations chairman Ako Bikol Rep. Elizaldy Co. Sara must be so forgetful that she did not remember that her resenting being asked questions, her demand that presiding officer Marikina Rep. Stella Quimbo be replaced and her pet peeve, ACT Teachers Rep. France Castro be kicked out of the panel provoked a furious response from Congress. Sara has no power to arrogate unto herself the authority to demand anything in Congress, and lawmakers knew that. When she insisted on it, the die was cast.
By refusing to answer questions and seeing a malicious campaign against her when queries that centered on financial irregularities were fielded, Sara exposed herself as a hard-headed bureaucrat engaged in projecting a la Donald Trump and using squid tactics to evade her interrogators. Apparently, she hasn’t read John 8:32, which says “And ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free” (King James Version) — in which Jesus Christ addressed a group of Jews who believed he was the Messiah. In common Latin, it is “veritas vos liberabit” and in German, “Die Wahrheit wird euch frei machen.” The verse is the motto of the Southern Methodist University (SMU) and Lafayette College in the US and the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. The verse is not found in the Talmud. By fudging her answers and dissing panel members, the lawmakers knew she wasn’t telling the truth.
The Congress panel allowed her to speak and read from her version of the teleprompter. Her speech, which condemned the panel members of engaging in a witch hunt (in the tradition of Roy Cohn and US Sen. Joseph McCartney) did not clarify where her 977,615 social services beneficiaries were, nor did it clear up her accountability for the P125 million spent in 11 days in December 2022. A total of P73.2 million of expenses were disallowed by the Commission on Audit (COA), a constitutional body that assesses whether public officials are remiss in their fiduciary duties or not. COA is not concerned about Sara’s antics as they are only after documents, bank accounts, receipts and evidence that public funds were not wasted.
Sara will soon face an avalanche of controversies which will force her to work 24/7, if she works at all, to answer Valeriano’s queries. For the P125 million, Sara is accountable since she did not have confidential and intelligence funds (CIF) in 2022 but she did not attend a transition meeting with former Vice President Leni Robredo to know the financial status of OVP as of June 30, 2022. Sara had zero CIF for the six months of 2022. Then you have the billions of pesos in expenses at the Department of Education (DepEd) that she will have to justify, along with hoarded, rotting food for children, millions of DepEd items stored in warehouses and the hundreds of millions in cash kept on regional offices rather than remitted to the national treasury.
Sara tried the victim card as she blasted lawmakers out to derail her supposed 2028 presidential bid. “I will not allow myself to be subjected to an inquiry based on an empty privilege speech just so you can attack me and do indirectly what you failed to do directly during the budget hearings,” Duterte roared. She then proceeded with fire and brimstone, saying she wouldn’t back down as if being asked to tell the truth is equivalent to pillorying her. The panel members simply looked through her, wondering what the hell was she talking about. No one was cowed by Sara’s playing the victim card. But they were delighted by her ignorance about the rules of congressional hearings. The late Presidents Benigno Aquino III and Fidel Ramos testified before Congress, naturally took their oaths, and talked about Dengvaxia in the case of Aquino, and independent power producers (IPPs) in the case of Ramos. There was no fuss, no questions about “resource persons” and “witnesses” and flawed law. They walked the talk. In the case of Sara, she talked and talked, and nobody listened. They simply ignored her.
