PH Cosa Nostra will regret Barzaga’s suspension

THE House of Representatives’ suspension of Cavite Rep. Francisco “Kiko” Barzaga for 60 days is not an act of imposing parliamentary discipline. It is an act of servility to Boss Martin Romualdez, an enforcement of the kind you would expect from a Cosa Nostra kind of organization, not a legislature.

Strip away the legalese about “disorderly behavior” and “unbecoming conduct,” and what remains is a blunt message from erstwhile House Speaker Martin Romualdez: I’m still in power, fall in line, or I will crush you. Do not especially condemn so harshly and in public, and accuse him of crimes, my boss, the president.

https://youtu.be/OP0jUNap_e0?si=lp4Z8meGSsyitZ4j

Barzaga’s case is the clearest proof yet that the House is no longer an independent institution. This Congress has been the most bribed ever by the president and his speaker as its members since 2022 have received probably a billion pesos in bribes in so many ways in just three years (from the ayudas in 2022 and the bigger budgetary “insertions” from 2023 to 2025). It has become a gang, a tightly controlled Cosa Nostra, a criminal society and organization whose primary mission is to protect the fortunes, ambitions and survival of one man. And like any gang, its authority is enforced through intimidation dressed up as procedure.

What exactly did Barzaga do?

According to the House Ethics Committee, he made “offensive” social media posts — some allegedly “incendiary,” some mocking institutions, some criticizing government corruption.

Let us be honest: if “offensive posts” were grounds for suspension, half the House should already be serving six-month bans, and the other half should be under investigation.

The charges are comically thin. Other lawmakers have hurled insults, peddled fake news, flaunted luxury lifestyles online and even incited mobs — yet the House never lifted a finger.

Why Barzaga? Because unlike the others, he committed the one unpardonable sin in a mafia-style Congress: He challenged not only the hierarchy there, he challenged its king.

Weaponization

This is another classic case of the unscrupulous weaponization of a law, in this case of a mere rule by the powerful. Indeed, the Constitution empowers each of the Congress houses to suspend a member for “disorderly behavior.” But these refer to actions that create chaos in the chamber, such as speaking without the president or speaker’s permission, heckling in a session, or much worse, as we have often seen in the other Asian parliaments, fisticuffs among the parliamentarians, that force the proceedings to be suspended.

It was not meant to curb a House member’s freedom of speech, even to criticize the very chamber he is a member of. How ridiculous could it be? There is freedom of speech for ordinary citizens (at least as they claim) but none for members of the House?

It took the ethics committee only two days to come out with their report recommending Barzaga’s suspension, a few hours for the House to approve it with a 249-5 vote. That’s a sign of an indication of the severity of the culture of corruption this administration has created. The Red representatives and nearly all of the so-called cause-oriented party-list representatives exposed themselves as Romualdez’s minions. The “Five Heroes” who voted against the suspension were Leandro Legarda Leviste (Batangas 1st district); Paolo Henry “Mike” Marcoleta (Sagip Party list); Elijah “Eli” San Fernando (Kamanggagawa Party list); Bong Suntay (Quezon City 4th district); and Robert “Bobby” Nazal (Bagong Henerasyon Party list).

I’m quite sure most of the congressmen didn’t even bother to read the report, just as most of the 230 representatives who signed the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte didn’t.

Marcos and Romualdez will regret that they got the House to suspend Barzaga. They have grossly underestimated the 27-year-old Barzaga. His suspension doesn’t have a restraining order: Barzaga will continue his barrage against them. And after this 60-day suspension, will the House again suspend him? Barzaga will do what he has done but on an intensified level, and without his duties in the House, he will have more time for his activism. I don’t think the House will be as easy to convince to suspend him the next time. Barzaga already has 1 million followers on his Facebook page; despite reportedly heavy funding to boost it, Romualdez’s has only half that.

Barzaga is on his way to becoming the hero of the youth sector, the largest cohort of voters in 2028, and will be joined by many more young representative-rebels in that House of Shame. With his clan’s longtime base in Dasmariñas, Cavite, he could even dismantle the Remullas’ hold on the province, as many of its educated, and well-informed residents loathe the two brothers’ increasingly untenable servility to the Marcoses.

He gives us hope that our republican system is not so hopeless.

Lacson son’s libel threat:

So stupid, so sickening

Sen. Panfilo Lacson should not send his son, Ronald Jay Lacson, who is also his chief of staff, on errands that only make both of them look ridiculous. Which is what he did when he got him to write (or just sign?) a letter to this paper protesting my column of Nov. 21 titled “Lacson defense of Marcos Jr. so stupid, so sickening.” He claimed that my column exceeded “the bounds of fair political comment and responsible journalism and is, hence, highly actionable,” hinting of a libel case being filed against me.

The younger Lacson makes himself look ridiculous; he has never been a journalist to know what “responsible journalism” is. He isn’t a lawyer to know what libel is, a crime that involves complex technicalities, such as when does a reporter become “malicious”? In fact, I even doubt the Lacson boy had a proper, four-year college education as in his Facebook page he merely says he was in the “Class of 1998” of Airlink International Aviation College, but does not mention whether he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in any of the fields of study the college offers, which includes drone operator and cabin mechanic. An X post by his father indicates his duties were that of “errand boy, adviser, chief of staff.”

In contrast to the Lacson boy’s total lack of competence to evaluate my column, a veteran lawyer Arnedo Valera, who is a member of both the New York and Philippine bar, sent a letter to the editor arguing that my kind of column is “essential to preserving robust political criticism and press freedom in the Philippines.” He argued that the column falls within constitutionally protected fair comment on matters of grave public concern, and that treating it as “malicious” would put a chill on democratic debate.

Unfortunately, this paper chose to publish it only in its internet version, the link for which is https://ift.tt/2QBg1FD.

Since the Lacson boy’s letter was published both in this paper’s print and internet version, I feel that it is just fair to publish Valera’s letter also on both platforms. I am presenting here only a summary of his arguments, which explain the important legal basis for debunking libel charges:

“Tiglao’s column is part of a larger national conversation on alleged large-scale corruption, the use of public office for private gain and efforts to shield President Marcos Jr. from accountability. It emphasizes that Lacson is a veteran public figure who voluntarily entered this arena to defend the president, and thus must expect rigorous scrutiny of his arguments, judgment and motivations.”

Calling such scrutiny “malicious,” Valera argues, seeks an improper privilege: the ability to defend power without facing equally forceful criticism.

Valera’s core legal argument rests on the doctrine of fair comment and qualifiedly privileged communication in Philippine jurisprudence. His letter cites cases like Borjal v. Court of Appeals and Vasquez v. Court of Appeals to stress that criticism of public figures on public issues is protected unless it involves clearly false factual allegations made with actual malice. My piece, he contends, was primarily a commentary on the plausibility and motives of Lacson’s public defense of Marcos in a corruption controversy, and thus falls squarely within protected political speech.

Rhetorical

Harsh phrases describing Lacson’s defense as “stupid” or “sickening” he characterized as rhetorical evaluations, not verifiable statements, placing them in the realm of opinion and political invective that cannot be proven true or false in court. The Tiglao column’s questions about whether a witness could have been induced “for a price” are inferential, not direct allegations of a specific crime, he said. Political commentary, Valera wrote, routinely draws such inferences from patterns, incentives and power dynamics without crossing into actionable defamation.

“There is widespread public suspicion around flood control budgets, infrastructure allocations and political horse trading. Against this backdrop, probing who benefits or who is being protected is legitimate journalistic work, not criminal insinuation. The standard for liability is not whether Lacson is offended but whether the column contains a demonstrably false statement of fact published with actual malice and outside the shelter of fair comment.

“Ridicule and contempt are unavoidable — and historically indispensable — features of democratic debate. Around the world, opinion pages freely use strong language to describe leaders, and the Philippine Supreme Court has recognized that public officials must tolerate more, not less, criticism than private citizens. Tiglao’s adjectives, while distasteful to some, serve a democratic function by expressing moral outrage at what he views as an attempt to sanitize the president’s role in serious allegations.

“Lacson’s demand that The Manila Times take ‘corrective action’ against Tiglao has a chilling effect on press freedom. Lacson intends to sideline critical writers and force apologies, leading to sanitized opinion pages. If every indignant political letter were treated as a quasi-disciplinary complaint, the paper would gradually silence the very voices that hold power to account.

“Branding sharp inferences and hyperbole as ‘malicious, false and highly actionable’ would inevitably lead to self-censorship by writers and editors. The Manila Times must stand by its columnist, welcome rebuttals and resist pressure to ’correct’ opinion writers for being unsparing toward the powerful. Protecting space for columns that label official defenses ‘stupid’ or ‘sickening’ is ultimately about defending the Filipino people’s right to a fearless conversation about those who govern them.”

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The post PH Cosa Nostra will regret Barzaga’s suspension first appeared on Rigoberto Tiglao.

PH Cosa Nostra will regret Barzaga’s suspension
Source: Breaking News PH