SEN. Rodante Marcoleta’s efforts to notch points on legal debates rest not on his full mastery of the law. His forte is finding gaps and missing pieces on issues he is trying to win, which is not exactly an indication of legal erudition. Can we call that his legal modus operandi? Or his operating shtick? His overall approach to legal confrontations is essentially this: find a legal hole somewhere, then hope that the “hole in the law” theorem gets some traction.
For example, in his bid to turn married contractors Curlee and Sarah Discaya into state witnesses in the unprecedented flood-control corruption saga now called “Floodgate,” Marcoleta wanted the best of both worlds for the couple, who, as the public faces of Floodgate, are now called by critics as the “king and queen of flood-control corruption.” This was Marcoleta’s proposition, publicly argued at a Senate hearing: the Discayas as state witnesses sans restitution. Meaning, the couple can shield themselves by ratting on others without returning to the state the billions of pesos they allegedly amassed by doing shoddy infrastructure work, which they reportedly won through rigged public biddings. More than P207 billion in contracts won from 2016 — the year former president Rodrigo Duterte’s administration began — to mid-2025.
In 2017, the Discayas partnered with CLTG Builders to undertake close to P1 billion worth of infrastructure projects in Davao City. CLTG stands for Christopher Lawrence Tesoro Go, the full name of Marcoleta’s comrade in the Duterte bloc in the Senate: Bong Go.
You probably remember the peg of Marcoleta’s argument for the Discayas. True to his legal shtick, it was a hole he found somewhere. He said there was nothing in the Constitution that required restitution for alleged crooks who wanted to turn state witnesses. Then Ombudsman Jesus Crispin Remulla, who was in that same Senate hearing, let out a forced grin — the type one flashes after a root canal — when asked of Marcoleta’s proposal. Sen. Panfilo Lacson, who does not suffer fools gladly, was more direct: Why are you so protective of the Discayas?
True journalism is not true journalism if it fails to provide an answer to that question. It was reported that Marcoleta’s wife Edna served as an independent director for Stronghold Insurance Co. Inc., which had the Discayas as major clients.
I will ask you: Can alleged crooks implicated in unprecedented acts of official corruption turn into instant state witnesses without expressing some form of remorse, without turning in the taxpayer money they stole, without publicly acknowledging their sickening malevolence? This is exactly what Marcoleta wanted for the Discayas. Maybe his bid for the couple can pass muster in a banana republic. But we still have a flawed republic vainly trying to “keep the republic.” Nations subscribing to the rules-based order are governed by rules of decency, morality, fairness and justice, which the “brilliant lawyer” Marcoleta apparently missed in his rush to get state witnesses status sans restitution for the Discayas.
Marcoleta applied the same legal modus operandi recently to something weightier: international law and questions of territory. During a floor debate with Sen. Francis Pangilinan a few days ago, Marcoleta questioned the existence of the West Philippine Sea (WPS), which is roughly all the waters, islands and shoals covered by our 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone (EEZ) on the country’s western side. An arbitral ruling in 2016 rightly said this territory belonged to the Philippines, the same ruling that denied China’s claim to it, one based on a fictional “nine-dash line.”
The “missing part” in Marcoleta’s argument this time rested on the supposed “nonexistent coordinates” of the area, which is codified in our laws as the WPS.
As in all cases of manufactured incredulity, the sum of Marcoleta’s doubts about the WPS’ existence came crumbling down in real time. Retired Supreme Court associate justice Antonio Carpio, a legal scholar on territorial issues, and on many complex areas of the law, as well — calling Carpio “brilliant” is probably an understatement — said “there is no need to announce the coordinates of the country’s exclusive economic zone, as international law provides for EEZ limits.”
“A coastal state (the Philippines, in the case of the WPS) has the inherent right to its continental shelf without need of any formal announcement, proclamation or occupation. There is, therefore, no need to proclaim the coordinates of the outer limits of the coastal state’s EEZ,” Carpio added.
The inherent-right principle was upheld in the rulings on the 1969 North Continental Shelf cases, based on Articles 76 and 77 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (Unclos), the former associate justice said. What needs publication, he added, are the coordinates of the archipelagic baseline per Articles 47 and 48 of the Unclos. The Philippines has officially complied with that under Republic Act 9522.
Carpio reminded Marcoleta of an established principle in international law: the land dominates the sea. And that “the rights of a coastal state over its continental shelf exist ipso facto and ab initio by the virtue of its sovereignty over the land.”
Lofty concepts such as the inherent rights of coastal states over their continental shelves will hardly move Marcoleta. His manufactured incredulity will not lead him to acknowledge that the WPS is for real and China’s nine-dash line is fiction.
