After redefining “forthwith,” the pestilence infesting the Senate is now moving to redefine “force majeure.”
This Senate deserves to be shut down, for force majeure – it’s in a state of calamity.
With each passing day, it seems that the Senate becomes more and more beyond redemption.
After that walkout by the minority Solid Bloc or SB-11 late on Tuesday night, a macabre comment that went around was where people could find the hired gun that Vice President Sara Duterte said she had contracted (“no joke, no joke”) to assassinate President Marcos, his wife Liza and cousin Martin Romualdez in case she herself would be murdered.
Considering the expertise of the Duterte camp in mass extermination, the thinking is that the hired gun is likely highly skilled – like the sniper who killed with just one shot mayor Antonio Halili of Tanauan, Batangas as he led the morning flag ceremony at the town hall in 2018 – and can easily take out anyone even if protected by the heavy firepower of the Senate sergeant-at-arms.
Halili was among several local officials on the so-called narco list of Rodrigo Duterte. Halili’s relatives denied that he was a drug trafficker. The sniper remains at large.
Sen. Ronald dela Rosa would know about the narco list, which was drawn up during his two years as Duterte’s chief of the Philippine National Police.
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In the current Senate, people whose mandate is to craft laws keep themselves busy either breaking it or bending it to suit their personal needs. They invoke impunity like a right, an entitlement to amass dirty money and commit mass murder.
In dealing with the abomination that the Senate has degenerated into, we must consider what’s at stake for many of the members of the majority. They are turbo-charged, on survival mode, to protect their political fortunes that are linked to their massive family fortunes.
More than saving Vice President Sara Duterte from ouster in an impeachment trial, they are focused on saving their own skins. They are bound not by any ideals or principles, but by the common need for self-preservation.
They put themselves above the law, shielding themselves from its reach, to stay out of prison and, for two of them, to avoid joining Rodrigo Duterte in The Hague.
These are powerful existential motivations, which can make them impervious to appeals for saving the Senate. Save the institution? They are hard-pressed as it is just trying to save themselves.
The one redefining force majeure – to justify allowing senators in hiding or behind bars to participate remotely in the chamber’s deliberations and voting – already did time in Bilibid for gun offenses. He is certain to do everything to prevent his return to the national penitentiary.
Sen. Panfilo Lacson, like Dela Rosa a former PNP chief and senator in hiding, said one way out of this calamitous impasse is to oust Alan Peter Cayetano, whose stint as Senate president will be remembered as the nadir of the chamber.
For this, 13 votes are needed, even if several of the current majority are incapacitated by detention without bail for various serious offenses.
Sen. Erwin Tulfo told “Storycon” on One News yesterday that two members of the majority might yet be persuaded to join the SB-11 and break the impasse.
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Defenders of the majority’s effort to railroad online voting – obviously tailor-made for Senator Bato and other future jailbirds among them – cite the effort to grant the same privilege to Leila de Lima when the Duterte administration put her behind bars on drug charges when she was a senator.
The difference between her and Dela Rosa have been pointed out: unlike Senator Bato, De Lima surrendered and placed herself in the jurisdiction of the courts.
Petitions to allow De Lima to continue participating in Senate deliberations and voting, either in person or electronically, which she herself filed before a regional trial court, or were pushed by her Senate colleagues, were all rejected by the RTC and Duterte’s allies.
If those DDS senators had approved her petition when Duterte was in power, they could cite it as a precedent that they can now apply to colleagues – not just Senator Bato, who is on the run, but the others who are expected to face arrest soon.
Both the RTC and the Senate, however, held that the rule requiring in-person attendance to vote on issues at the Senate, including replacing the Senate leadership, is inviolable. Even if a senator is merely in a room adjacent to the session hall, the senator can’t cast a vote.
Trust SP Alan Peter Cayetano, however, to invoke a rule that will effectively allow the slim majority to do anything that it wants with the rules, even before the committee on rules is constituted.
The SB-11 said they would challenge such a move before the Supreme Court, by invoking grave abuse of authority. This is one time that poking its nose into the internal affairs of a co-equal branch – which the SC did when it rewrote the House impeachment rules – will be appreciated.
There’s the risk, of course, that the SC, packed with Duterte appointees, will rule in favor of the pestilence that has descended on the Senate.
Still, the alternative to legal intervention could be extralegal methods of restoring order.
We’re stuck with this horrible chamber for two more years. Malacañang is said to be mediating between the two factions to prevent paralysis in Congress.
People are wondering if the Senate in its current state is even worth saving. The chamber has become infested with termites who will eventually bring down the house on which they feed for survival.
And we taxpayers are even paying them millions of pesos for it.