BIBLE-VERSE quoting Alan Peter Cayetano tried to stabilize things at the chaotic Senate after the May 11 Senate putsch that installed him as the new Senate president. Here is the backgrounder on why Cayetano tried to calm the frayed nerves at a critical institution once called “the best deliberative body” in the country. And now called a chamber of tragedy and farce.
On May 11, the day the House of Representatives overwhelmingly voted to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte for the second time based on alleged serious crimes, the Senate changed leadership. The highlight of the Senate putsch was the sudden appearance of long-absent Sen. Ronald Dela Rosa at the chamber with the precise mission of voting to help install Cayetano as the new Senate leader.
It turned out that Dela Rosa did emerge at the Senate after a long absence not only to help his political ally Cayetano become Senate president. De la Rosa was also aware that the International Criminal Court has issued a warrant against him for being a co-conspirator in the commission of “crimes against humanity.” The principal in that case is former president Rodrigo Duterte, now in The Hague awaiting trial. Only a Senate led by a close ally like Cayetano would grant him “protective custody,” and thus avoid arrest.
It also turned out that Dela Rosa barely managed to safely reach the Senate chambers. Lawmen out to serve the warrant of arrest lay in wait, then chased Dela Rosa in the Senate halls but failed to serve the warrant. At one point in the chase, Dela Rosa stumbled.
The next day, Dela Rosa slipped out of the Senate under the cover of gunfire allegedly with the help of Sen. Robinhood Padilla, a pardoned felon, now a senator of the realm. The great escape was plotted after legal experts weighed in and said “protective custody” has no legal basis. The dramatis personae in the escape were Padilla, a pardoned felon and now senator, and Dela Rosa, another senator indicted for “crimes against humanity.”
It was this context that apparently pushed the bible-verse quoting Cayetano to explain that the Senate coup was done to fast-track legislation for the common good, not a power grab of power-hungry senators aligned with him. Not quite, said the netizens, it was a power grab, and the participants in the putsch are also aligned with Sara Duterte, whose impeachment case will be tried by the senators this July.
The backlash to Cayetano’s explainer was immediate, topped by netizens invoking Galatians 6, which says, “You reap what you sow.” The chaos and the depressing regression of a once-revered political institution to a crime scene was all your doing. The UP-based student group that gave Cayetano his early start in politics, Nagkakaisang Tugon, asked Cayetano to resign. The archenemy of Nagkakaisang Tugon in UP politics — Samasa — joined Tugon in calling for Cayetano to step down. A toned-down statement was issued by his Ateneo law class.
Senators in the Gang of 13 that installed Cayetano as the new Senate leader likewise were whiplashed in the tsunami of condemnation from cultural organizations, the academic community, civic institutions. Awards were recalled, portraits were taken down and bitterly worded statements of “how could you sabotage the constitutional mandate of impeachment” were issued. The public’s distaste and loathing toward the power grab inevitably led to the tarnished reputations of the Gang of 13.
It was a time of reckoning like no other. You reap what you sow.
The figurative bridge-burning of the civic institutions with the senators in the Gang of 13 will also inevitably lead to other things. Two things, actually. Elevated monitoring by the civic institutions of the impeachment process against the Duterte princeling under the Cayetano-led Senate. And following up the progress of Senate Blue Ribbon Committee report on flood control corruption that the previous Blue Ribbon Committee Chairman Panfilo Lacson wrote for committee-level then plenary approval. What will happen to the Lacson report now that the Senate — as presently constituted — has three majority members indicted in the multibillion-peso flood control corruption?
The civic institutions that lashed out at the Gang of 13 after the putsch have no illusion that the senators in the Cayetano-led majority will be fair and open-minded during the trial. It is their belief that the new majority is a collection of Duterte loyalists, Duterte sympathizers and spineless fence-sitters who have decided that Sara Duterte is the nation’s president-in-waiting, and they have to hitch their political fortunes to the would-be president.
The civic institutions, however, realize that the impeachment process is a very public process and that eternal vigilance would be the most effective deterrent to any scheme to subvert the impeachment process. The attempt of Estrada loyalists to block the most damning evidence presented by the House prosecutors in the Senate trial of deposed president Joseph Estrada — and the ensuing public outrage that resulted from that effort — is the historical anecdote deeply remembered by the current civic institutions. History can repeat itself.
The civic institutions, again remembering history, do not want the Lacson report on flood control corruption to be forgotten, then archived. They clearly remember what happened to the painstaking effort of former senator Richard Gordon, the chairman of the Blue Ribbon Committee during the presidency of Sara’s father, Rodrigo Duterte, to probe, then write a comprehensive report on the Pharmally scam.
Gordon’s Blue Ribbon Committee documented that a P42-billion fund was squandered during the Rodrigo Duterte years — during a Covid emergency at that — in orgies of corruption and spending recklessness.
Gordon’s report failed to gain committee and plenary approval, and that report now in the Senate archives.
