Senate President Pro Tempore Panfilo ‘Ping’ Lacson made a cryptic remark on Tuesday about an ‘overly vocal, boastful or aggressive’ person.
Lacson did not name names, but he used the pronoun ‘he,’ suggesting he was referring to a male individual.
‘There is a saying: ‘The loudest one in the room is the weakest’,’ Lacson said in a post on X (formerly Twitter).
‘He is overly vocal, boastful, or aggressive so he can create an image of strength through noise,’ he also said.
The best way to deal with such a personality is ‘to ignore and make him stand on an empty platform,’ according to the senator.
Lacson chairs the Senate Blue Ribbon committee, which saw him locking horns with former panel chair Rodante Marcoleta. He also listened to bombshell revelations implicating current and former senators in the flood control anomalies.
Lacson admitted the revelations made during the hearings pained him – a sentiment he expressed when asked to react on Sen. Francis Escudero’s Monday manifestation that senators are being made a ‘fall guy’ in flood control anomalies.
‘I would like to reiterate my previous and oft-repeated statement that we will go where the evidence leads us,’ the senator told reporters in a text message, adding that no senator is being ‘targeted’ and neither will anyone be ‘shielded or spared’ by the probe.
‘No matter how unpopular, even painful for me, to hear the names of my colleagues being implicated by resource persons, I will not be deterred,’ Lacson said.
During the Blue Ribbon committee hearing, Escudero and former Senators Ramon ‘Bong’ Revilla Jr. and Nancy Binay were alleged by former Public Works and Highways Undersecretary Robert Bernardo to be involved in a purported scheme involving anomalous flood control projects.
All of them denied the allegations.
Aside from them, Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Joel Villanueva were also the subject of a damning testimony by Brice Hernandez, a former assistant district engineer of DPWH-Bulacan, during a House infrastructure committee hearing.
Estrada and Villanueva refuted the allegations.
Hernandez alleged that Villanueva and Estrada maneuvered to allocate P600 million and P355 million for funding in Bulacan’s first district in exchange for an alleged 30-percent cut.
Over the weekend, Lacson disclosed that ‘almost all’ senators in the 19th Congress inserted at least P100 billion worth of items in the 2025 General Appropriations Act.
Estrada, in thinly veiled allusion to Lacson’s revelation, on Monday said: ‘Since a senator has already mentioned that we have significant insertions, let’s allocate them to the Office of the Vice President so she can be a working vice president.’ /apl /atm