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Suarez, who has defended Romualdez from tirades and has consistently criticized Vice President Sara Duterte, ascends to the House’s second highest post
Congressman Jay-Jay Suarez is the new senior deputy speaker of the House of Representatives.
The position of deputy speaker is the second highest in the chamber. He gets to preside over the session when the Speaker is unavailable.
It’s a role that comes with many perks — he also becomes an ex-officio member of all committees, allowing him to vote in all committee deliberations.
He also usually gets an additional annual budget and a bigger office.
The deputy speakership remains a prestigious post, but it used to be rarer.
In the 1990s, there were only three deputy speakers — one each for Luzon, Visayas, and Mindanao.
By the tail end of the Duterte years, it seemed like the position had no limits, with 32 deputy speakers under the leadership of Lord Allan Velasco in the House.
At that time, Velasco assigned a senior deputy speaker — his close ally Doy Leachon of Oriental Mindoro — perhaps to offer distinction among the dozens of deputy speakers.
The House rules handbook does not specify the role of the senior deputy speaker, so the title seems more political than functional.
When Martin Romualdez became speaker, he named his mentor Gloria Arroyo the senior deputy speaker.
When they had a falling out, he removed the word “senior” from her title. It seemed like a symbolic move more than anything else, since there are no clear extra duties for the senior deputy speaker.
Later, he replaced her with then-Pampanga 3rd District representative Dong Gonzales. After Gonzales ended his final term in June, he was succeeded by Jay-Jay Suarez.
Suarez is a veteran politician. While he has been in the House for only six years, he has 15 years of experience in local government work, mostly as governor and vice governor of Quezon province.
He also briefly served as an assistant secretary at the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
He was born into politics, coming from a dynasty in Quezon.
His father, Danilo Suarez, was also once its governor and had served as district congressman for 21 years. The Suarez patriarch also became the House minority leader.
The younger Suarez is one of Speaker Romualdez’s most trusted allies. In the 19th Congress, Romualdez rarely gave interviews with the press, even when Vice President Sara Duterte was already attacking him in public.
Doing the media rounds to retaliate on his behalf were his closest allies, including Suarez.
In recent months, Suarez has been one of the House’s most ardent defenders of its impeachment of the Vice President. – Rappler.com
The text above is an English translation, generated with an OpenAI model, of a partially modified transcript from a video report written and produced by Rappler reporter Dwight de Leon. The translation has been reviewed by an editor prior to publication.
