First of two parts
THERE is an old and ugly tradition in Philippine politics: the weaponization of the law. Not the application of it, but the weaponization. The difference matters enormously. One is justice; the other is control. As the Senate careens from one crisis to the next in 2026, it is becoming impossible to ignore the pattern of how President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s administration has deployed both lavish rewards and the blunt force of prosecution to bend the upper chamber to its will.
Let us begin with the carrot because it always comes first. According to the Makabayan bloc, each senator in the 2026 national budget was allocated roughly P3.2 billion in what critics have called "pork" or "allocables," discretionary infrastructure funds that, whatever their legal designation, function as political currency. This is not a new phenomenon in Philippine governance. But its scale and its strategic timing in an administration desperate to consolidate control over a fractious Senate is worth noting carefully. Even Sen. Imee Marcos, the president's own sister, called the 2026 budget "the sneakiest," saying the pork barrel was merely fragmented and redistributed across multiple items rather than eliminated. "The pork was chopped, broken into parts and spread out," she said. "But even after being ground up, it's still pork."
When each senator sits on a P3.2-billion pile of infrastructure money that flows, or does not, depending on the pleasure of the executive, the notion of senatorial independence becomes a polite fiction. You do not need to call a senator to Malacañang and make an explicit offer. The architecture of the budget does it for you, quietly and efficiently, every single year of this Marcos Jr. administration from 2023 to the current. A cooperative senator's district gets roads, bridges, flood control channels. An uncooperative senator's district gets delays, audits and excuses. This is money politics in its most refined form, plausibly deniable, structurally embedded, and devastatingly effective.
Now comes the stick. Sen. Jinggoy Estrada, a member of the pro-Duterte Senate majority, surrendered to police on June 1 after the Sandiganbayan ordered his arrest for plunder, a nonbailable offense, in connection with the flood control corruption scandal. The charge involves alleged kickbacks of P573 million from government-funded flood control projects. Estrada denied wrongdoing. But more tellingly, before he turned himself in, he claimed he had been offered the dismissal of the charges against him in exchange for leaving the majority bloc aligned with Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano. The Ombudsman's Office told him not to "mix politics with accountability." That is sound advice. The problem is that it is increasingly difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.
Estrada himself said the corruption cases he faced, and his arrest were a result of his being aligned with the camp of former president Rodrigo Duterte and his daughter, Vice President Sara Duterte, a former ally but now an arch political rival of President Marcos. "I will not yield to threats. I will not be intimidated," he told reporters at the Senate.
Now, it is entirely possible that Estrada is guilty. He has faced plunder charges twice before, in 2001 and again in the PDAF scam, and was acquitted both times. The flood control scandal is real, the corruption is documented, and some of the figures implicated deserve to be in court. But the question is not only whether the accused are guilty. The question is also: why these senators, why now, and why in this sequence? Accountability that is selectively deployed against political enemies while sparing allies is not accountability. It is a weapon.
Sen. Ronald dela Rosa's situation adds another dimension. The Philippine Supreme Court refused to block the ICC arrest warrant against dela Rosa, with the Marcos administration's own spokesman confirming the warrant was valid. Unlike Estrada's domestic charges, where the merits can at least be debated, the ICC warrant is rooted in an international legal process examining thousands of deaths in the drug war. But even here, the timing of the administration's decision to allow enforcement, coming precisely as de la Rosa and his allies were consolidating a Senate bloc hostile to Malacañang, raised eyebrows from observers who otherwise support ICC accountability.
The result, taken together, is a Senate where independence is a performance and compliance is rewarded. Senators who play ball get their billions in allocables. Senators who cross the line, who back the wrong leadership, who refuse the right deal, who stand with the wrong former president, find that the ombudsman suddenly develops an interest in their flood control records, or that an ICC warrant becomes suddenly enforceable.
To be concluded on June 16, 2026
