Last of two parts
THIS is not governance. This is the management of a chamber. The danger goes beyond any single senator or any case. Critics have estimated that around P695 billion in the 2026 budget is earmarked for presidential, congressional, and Senate pork combined, a sum so large that it creates a permanent gravitational pull toward the executive. When the budget is the carrot and the Ombudsman’s Office is the stick, legislative oversight becomes theater. Senators cannot meaningfully check a president's power when they depend on that president for their district's infrastructure and fear his prosecutorial machinery if they dissent.
What must change is structural, not merely personal. Pork barrel in all its forms, whether called "allocables," "insertions," or "soft pork," must be abolished root and branch, with budgets tied to agencies rather than legislators. The ombudsman must be demonstrably, visibly independent, with case selection driven by evidence and timing driven by investigation rather than the political calendar.
But beyond structure, what this moment demands is something rarer and more difficult: conscience.
Because at the end of every Senate intrigue, every walkout and leadership grab, every arrest and counter-allegation, there are 115 million Filipinos who wake up every morning with problems none of these senators are losing sleep over. There are families in Bulacan and Pampanga who have been flooded every typhoon season for a decade because billions meant to protect them were converted into suitcases of cash and delivered to powerful men in exclusive subdivisions. There are barangay health workers still waiting for a Magna Carta that stalled because billions were converted into suitcases of cash. There are patients detained in hospitals over unpaid bills that legislation sitting on the Senate floor could have abolished, had the majority not been too busy choosing sides in a power struggle to legislate.
These are not abstractions. These are the constituents that every senator swore an oath to serve. Not Marcos. Not Duterte. Not their faction leader. Not the bloc that controls the next budget cycle. The people. The ones who cannot afford a lawyer when the law is weaponized against them, who cannot call a press conference when they are wronged, who have no suitcase full of cash to deliver to anyone.
The senators now caught between the carrot and the stick have no one to blame but themselves because greed built the trap they are standing in. They took the allocables. They played the insertions game. They looked the other way when the flood control billions vanished. And now, when the same machinery of reward and punishment turns its eye toward them, they cry persecution. Some of them are being persecuted. The cases are politically timed. The ombudsman's calendar is suspiciously aligned with Malacañang's interests. All of that may be true, and it still does not make them innocent of their own compromises.
A senator who accepted the carrot has no moral standing to complain about the stick. That is the hell of it. And it is entirely self-made. So, cut with duty and standing for the Senate when you crossed. Those spins are age-old and the one making it does not deserve to do so.
There is still a way out — but it does not run through Malacañang, or through a new Senate president, or through a clever parliamentary maneuver. It runs through the only thing that has ever genuinely protected a Filipino legislator from executive tyranny: the trust of the people they represent. A senator who is unambiguously, demonstrably, visibly fighting for his constituents, who has clean hands, a documented record and the courage to say what is true even when it costs him, is harder to break than one whose only defense is that his enemies are worse than he is.
The Senate was never meant to be a prize to be captured by whoever controls the budget. It was meant to be a fortress, not for senators, but for the Filipino people against the overreach of any president, from any party, in any era. That fortress does not fall because of ICC warrants or plunder charges or walkouts. It falls when the people inside it forget who they are guarding it for. The 19th and 20th have truly been shameful periods in congressional history. And it all happened and is happening under a Marcos, again!
Some of these men and women still have time to remember. The country is watching. History is unforgiving. And the constituents they abandoned to play their games are still there — still flooding, still sick, still waiting — with nowhere else to turn.
