Spat

Nothing gets some of our senators all riled up more than the matter of money — to be precise, public money thrown around with a lot of personal discretion.

That sad scene at the Senate session floor last Wednesday might have been forthcoming although it was entirely avoidable.

That it was forthcoming we saw from the increasingly bitter personal attacks mounted against Senate President Juan Ponce Enrile by the four minority senators who received less of additional fund allocations than the rest of their colleagues. Insults were traded. Dirty linen were hung out to dry.

This was all incongruous. The prestige of the Senate as an institution was being eroded with every passing day. This is not what the institution of the Senate was intended to be: a circus for grudge matches, an arena for gladiators who slay their colleagues with poisoned speech.

The Senate was not intended as a coliseum for its members to indulge in their pettiest grievances against their peers. Nor was this intended as a theater for thrashing reputations with wild abandon, even if that seems to be the case when public hearings supposedly “in aid of legislation” are conducted.

The name by which the chamber is called draws from a long history beginning from the early days of the Roman Republic. The word “Senate” has the same Latin root as “senior” or “senile.” Originally, it was designed as an assembly of the most respected statesmen who gift the political community with their sagacity.

In any polity, there is always use for a council of elders. They guide us with institutional memory, suffuse political debate with superior insight. We draw from this chamber enlightenment, wisdom shaped by experience, a sense of what is truly important for the nation. This is why the members of this chamber are elected at large: they do not represent parochial concerns, embodying instead the national interest in its most noble sense.

For a while, the Philippine Senate abided by its historical intent. The institution was the den of statesmen, pondering the nation’s fate from a superior plane, nearly above the politics of the day and certainly shielded from petty personal obsessions.

The chamber included the widest swath of opinion, the better to review issues from all angles. Our voters chose the wisest, most independent minds for the privilege of sitting in this chamber and soberly deliberating with their peers.

If there were personal issues among the senators, those were not dragged to the floor. If there were any eccentricities or strange proclivities among the senators, these were never publicly discussed. The semblance of a chamber of the most esteemed statesmen, mythical as that might be, was always maintained.

Things have changed — and changed, indeed.

The consensus among those who remember this chamber at its finest is that the quality of deliberation deteriorated immensely. The senators strut about like inquisitors, freely impugning reputations and insinuating beyond what the facts could support. As in the High Court of yore, collegiality once enjoyed a premium. It was all the public saw.

In the Senate’s finest moment, it would have been unthinkable that one of its members could drive a respected general to suicide or another would accuse a colleague of paying househelp out of the chamber’s funds. Absolutely no one would dare suggest senators use their office to extort or set up oversight committees entirely for the funds of it.

Certainly, it was unthinkable for anyone to accuse the Senate President of monkeying around with the chamber’s money or insinuate unelected staffers effectively run the chamber.

Those are precisely what Sen. Alan Cayetano implies in his utterances. Still, that carnival that happened last Wednesday was avoidable.

All Cayetano had to do was to rise on a matter of personal privilege and request the chamber to be audited by a private firm considering the COA had already cleared the Senate President’s realignment of year-end savings. That proposal alone is loaded with imputation. The young senator did not have to embroider that request with all sorts of disrespectful wordplay.

Had he behaved like a statesman (although the proposal had unseemly implications), things might have passed rather routinely. Senate President Enrile, after all, readily acceded to the suggestion, firmly convinced everything in the manner he administered the Senate was above board.

That ugly tussle would not have happened. Senators need not behave like fishwives on the floor. They may quarrel like children in the privacy of their lounge, never in full public view. They may ruthlessly maneuver against each other but they never need to talk about it.

We did not elect our senators to go about bitch-slapping each other day in and day out. We want them to be an edifying presence in our public life, not grist for the cheapest of rumor mills.

The Senate is such an expensive enterprise to maintain. We want that chamber to educate us, not to provide us with banal entertainment.

If Sen. Alan Cayetano thinks the chamber’s finances could be better managed, he might have made concrete recommendations in caucus. It is totally unseemly to indulge in scandal-mongering in the full glare of an aghast public.

We do not know how this drama will end. We do not know if the damaged institution that is the Philippine Senate can still rise to its former heights of public esteem.

What we do know is the Senate has so many things to do in so little time to deliver the service they are sworn to. Damaged or not, we want this institution to return to functionality.