EDITORIAL - Priorities

After several days of huffing and puffing in an attempt to blow down the house of Sen. Manny Villar, what did the Senate leadership achieve? Villar further closed in on the frontrunner in the presidential race, Sen. Benigno “Noynoy” Aquino III, with their ratings in the latest Pulse Asia Survey now a statistical tie.

The struggle for an official censure of the Nacionalista Party standard-bearer ate up so much of the Senate’s time. This was compounded by the refusal of the minority to allow the passage of Malacañang-backed bills that would have given fixed terms and allowed the incumbent officials of the Philippine Amusement and Gaming Corp. as well as the National Telecommunications Commission to keep their posts beyond June 30.

Urgent pieces of legislation will now have to wait, going through the legislative mill once again in the 15th Congress. The public can only hope that the next Congress will have better priorities.

While there is merit in going after a legislator who is accused of violating ethics and possibly even breaking the law, it was clear even before Congress went on Christmas break that the effort to censure Villar had been so politically poisoned that a non-partisan debate on the merits had become impossible. It did not help that those leading the charge were Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile, who is hardly an icon of good governance, and whose party’s standard-bearer Joseph Estrada is running a far third behind Aquino and Villar in the surveys. The other key accuser, Sen. Jamby Madrigal, is a tail-ender in the presidential race, while the original accuser, Sen. Panfilo Lacson, has fled the country to avoid arrest for twin murders.

If there was more than politics in the Senate case against Villar, appropriate charges can still be filed in court. In the meantime, urgent pieces of legislation are dead, in the Senate as well as in the House, where members simply decided to take an early vacation and no longer showed up for a quorum. Those pieces of legislation include investment enhancement measures, the Freedom of Information Act, the Cybercrime Prevention Act, the New Central Bank Act, the Reproductive Health bill and the Early Voting bill.

Voters can do more than hope that the next Congress will be better; they can register their displeasure over the work of the current bunch through the ballot in May.