The better House unites for truth

"Legislators are like animals in a zoo," Will Rogers said. "You can’t do anything about ‘em, except stand and watch ‘em." And so Filipinos watched for weeks, switching TV channels from the Senate inquiry on jueteng to the House of Representatives’ on Gloria-gate. Both had lagged too long. At the Senate paraded "repentant" vice men with hearsay on presidential kin in cohorts’ payolas. At the House wrangled a hundred members of five committees over ground rules, the veracity of innumerable wiretap CDs, and whether to admit such illegal materials. By Thursday though, the latter settled all rifts and united to hear a CD of Alan Paguia, Joseph Estrada’s ex-lawyer. In contrast, the Senate strayed from its topic. This confirms that the House is the better chamber, while exposing personal interests that senators harbor.

The House began deeply divided. The Majority was out to shield Gloria Arroyo from airing of bugged chats with Comelec’s Virgilio Garcillano during the 2004 canvassing. Going for the Minority was that, of five committee heads, three are Opposition – Gilbert Remulla, Ted Locsin, Simeon Kintanar – who only happen to be in Speaker Joe de Venecia’s Majority bloc. Of the two with Ms Arroyo’s loyalist Kampi, one resigned midstream, leaving his post to a Minority man. Still the hearings went on, unruly at first but aiming for a conscience vote. Remulla tended to lean towards ex-Minority pals but quickly righted himself. Many times on Locsin’s request, Administration stalwarts Salacnib Baterina and Simeon Datumanong, lawyers both, gave unbiased judgments on procedural and legal splits.

The Minority had expected the Majority to quash the CD at all costs, and planned a walkout in case. To the chagrin of the leftists who are with the Majority (enjoying its perks) yet want Ms Arroyo ousted, the Majority overwhelmingly opted for public playing. Kampi’s Rodolfo Antonino best explained it: the CD is a product of illegal wiretap, it is not authentic as Paguia admitted to splicing from two lengthier cassettes, but play it anyway for transparency and legislation. No way would they hide "the second envelope", alluding to evidence that the Senate trashed during Estrada’s impeachment and thus set off an uprising.

It was as dramatic as the House’s swift dispatch, against all odds in 2000, of Estrada’s case for Senate trial. Even de Venecia, just arrived from Europe with Italian PM Berlusconi’s pledge for the Paris Club to swap RP debts for equity, joined the "ayes". There was to be no repeat of EDSA.

The Senate act miscued under Manny Villar and Lito Lapid’s committees on public order and amusements. Bereft of the bandied "final witness" to tie Ms Arroyo to jueteng, they veered to the infamous Jose Pidal alias bank account. Broadcaster Arnold Clavio and PNP handwriting expert Mely Sorra were called to the stand. Ahead of them to expose a vice lord’s P50-million hush offer was Sandra Cam, a bagwoman who claims to have once paid off Mikey and Iggy Arroyo. When she identified the briber as Bong Pineda of Pampanga, Lapid, often linked to the culprit, turned to Clavio. He rued that text jokes in 2003 had inverted his surname into Pidal, and since his grandpa is a Jose, he asked Clavio if Iggy’s "Pidal" signature was real. No expert on such, Clavio was dumbfounded. Serge Osmeña quickly shifted to Sorra. On Ping Lacson’s 2003 exposé of the Pidal deposits, the Blue-Ribbon board had initiated an investigation of Mike Arroyo but abruptly stopped when brother Iggy, then a private citizen, claimed it was his. Osmeña’s committee on banks held a separate probe in which Sorra swore to have witnessed Iggy convincingly signing as "Pidal". Now she was saying she never saw him sign, but only received two sets of specimens to compare from her boss Gen. Restituto Mosqueda.

The point was to get to the bottom of the Pidal multimillion-peso stash. And well the Senate should. But it was a contrived venue. Only last week, after Cam testified that Mosqueda once bragged about practising Iggy for a week to sign as "Pidal", Lacson said he would move to reopen the Blue-Ribbon inquest. Yet he knew he had to wait for Congress to resume on July 25 to do so. But Osmeña, who didn’t bother to reconvene his own group on the same, used the Villar and Lapid jueteng probes for it. Lapid looked pleased with the diversion from Pineda, though. Villar became the butt of murmurs of siding with the oust-Arroyo Opposition so that his ally Vice President Noli de Castro may inherit her post, and he would in turn be appointed as new VP. The Senate got into a mess – again. Only the timely arrival of Dick Gordon put the hearing back on track, as he sought proof of Cam’s boast to have once been a Masbate board member. The provincial election staff showed contrary documents; then two women rose to swear that Cam had swindled them. Still and all, prone now to legal questioning is the improper digression of a jueteng hearing.

The House and Senate probes resume tomorrow. Paguia is under orders to submit his two original cassettes. From last week’s precedent, the House bodies will know what to do with them. The Majority believes either Paguia’s cassettes or the missing Sammy Ong’s master tapes contain phone calls as well of three Opposition bigwigs to Garcillano.

The Senate, meanwhile, expectedly will go on acting like a court of law that can determine guilt. Still not in its agenda is how a 115,000-strong police, only half of whom are deployed in Luzon, can lick its jueteng army of more than 200,000 cabos and cobradors.

A tired old watcher once summed up all Congress investigations by the saying, "After all is said and done, more is said than done." Only with the Senate, perhaps.

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