Pleasure of the president

One thing commonly understood about members of the Cabinet, being political appointees, is that “they serve at the pleasure of the president.” This is a neat qualifier that often works in favor of the appointee, that is if the appointing power allows him.

 Time and again we have seen appointees who, for one reason or another, become the object of public scorn, leading to demands for their resignation. But the Philippines is a country where almost nobody resigns. So the qualifier becomes a convenient excuse to hold on.

 Except for the very rare example of Jose de Jesus recently giving up the DOTC portfolio, most other political appointees who meet with controversy or get mired in scandal tenaciously try to buttress their positions by invoking the qualifier “I serve at the pleasure of the president.”

 Of course, to a president with sensibilities attuned to the national interest and public sentiment, that is a very limp excuse to stay on. Such a president can just as easily take up an official on that jaded line and fire him. End of story.

 But either the scenario simply doesn’t apply in the Philippines, or we just don’t have that kind of president. And I do not just refer to Noynoy Aquino but to all presidents. Firing just isn’t in the presidential vocabulary.

 The best that any Philippine president has ever done under the circumstances is implement a reshuffle or revamp, which is nothing more than a game of musical chairs. Officials get shunted from one portfolio to another and that’s it.

 Of all presidents who ever played the “pleasure of the president” game, however, it is Noynoy Aquino who has taken it to an entirely different level. Instead of a Cabinet reshuffle to appease the public, Noynoy has taken to washing dirty linen in public.

 In an unprecedented move, Noynoy told his audience at the 113th anniversary of the DPWH that there are two or three members of his Cabinet who he dreads seeing because they are harbingers of bad news.

 He said that other Cabinet members are always ready with solutions to problems. But the two or three, whose names he did not mention, have nothing to bring but problems and bad news, which is why, he said, he seldom grants appointments to see them.

 Frankly I am aghast that Noynoy felt it in the interest of anyone to make such a disclosure. His candidness in this regard neither props personal honesty as a virtue nor serves a worthy purpose like keeping his house in order.

 As I said, if we had a president with sensibilities attuned to the national interest and public sentiment, he could just have simply fired the three Cabinet men who keep giving him the headache and who, by his own admission, he now dreads to see.

 Nothing could be clearer than that. These two or three members of the Cabinet no longer give the president any pleasure. They can no longer invoke the limp qualifier of “serving at the pleasure of the president.” They know who they are, so they must resign.

 It would have been far easier, and less messier, if Noynoy just went ahead and fired them, instead of admitting his displeasure in public yet still wait for them to be consumed by a sense of delicadeza they do not have and resign on their own.

By refusing to fire them despite his publicized displeasure, Noynoy only succeeded in painting himself into a corner. What if the three Cabinet men do not resign, taking heart from the fact that the president did not name them? Can he survive fresh charges of cronyism?