Marcos’ Senate bloc thinks Filipinos are stupid

THE Marcos bloc in the Senate struggling to implement the budding dictator’s two-pronged agenda to bar through impeachment Vice President Sara Duterte’s presidential candidacy in 2028, and the investigation of the massive flood control scam has gone berserk. It has sunk to the depths of depravity, blatantly violating the Constitution and the Senate’s own rules.

On the last session day of the 20th Congress, with the chamber about to adjourn sine die, 11 of the Marcos senators deceived the nation into believing that the defection of Sen. Francis Escudero, who had hitherto been with the bloc led by Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano, to their cabal made them the majority.

They claimed that they were authorized by the Constitution and the body’s rules to replace committee chairmen and the Senate president pro tempore who had been elected only three days before. And within the hour, Malacañang issued a statement giving its blessing to the whole performance as “the rule of law.” It most certainly was not.

They think Filipinos are stupid: The Marcos faction with the addition of Escudero, now has 12 senators — so does the Cayetano-led group that was simultaneously reduced by that move. Therefore, there was no quorum, which the 1987 Constitution defines as a majority of the membership of the Senate, that can do business like overhauling the body’s leadership.

The Constitution computes the Senate majority on the basis of 24 senators, not 22. Sen. Jinggoy Estrada has been jailed on trumped-up plunder charges while Sen. Ronald dela Rosa is fleeing a warrant of the widely condemnedInternational Criminal Court. But they have not been declared as losing their posts to nullify the votes of tens of millions of Filipinos who elected them — as similarly then-senators Leila de Lima and Antonio Trillianes IV were not. The entire membership of 24 senators remains to be the denominator for determining the “majority,” which is 13, not 12. Other than criminal conviction, a senator loses his post only by expulsion by two-thirds of all senators, or 16 votes. There has been no move to expel Estrada and dela Rosa.

Majority

But even if one concedes to the Marcos faction’s stupid claim that the majority is half plus one, or 12 of the 22 senators, it had no authority to elect a new Senate president pro tempore and committee chairmen. Twelve does not constitute a quorum — defined also as the majority, or 13 — necessary to undertake an overhaul of the Senate’s leadership. Therefore, the Senate’s leadership remains unchanged from the one made on June 1 by 13 senators, until one band increases its ranks in the next session that commences on July 26.

To oust a sitting Senate president and elect his replacement requires 13 votes — a majority of the 24-member chamber. The bloc that moved against Cayetano had 12. By their own arithmetic, they were one vote short of the power they were exercising. Even the bloc’s leader, Sen. Erwin Tulfo, conceded that Cayetano “remains Senate president” precisely because the 13th vote never materialized. So they did not remove him. They could not. Instead, they did something far more ingenious and far more dangerous: Unable to vacate the office by the rules, they simply declared it vacant by motion, and crowned an “acting” president to walk through the gap.

The Marcos gang invoked the 1949 case of Avelino v. Cuenca as though the Supreme Court had definitively ruled that 12 senators can control the Senate.

It did no such thing. The court’s opinions were fragmented, the discussion centered on a peculiar quorum controversy involving an absent senator, and much of what is now cited as doctrine was, at best, incidental commentary, what in legalese is called an obiter dictum, not a binding legal precedent. What is not incidental is the Constitution’s plain text: The Senate president shall be elected by a majority vote of all the Senate’s members. In a 24-member Senate, that number is 13 — not 12.

The Supreme Court, in fact, on the constitutionality of the ouster of then-Senate president Jose Avelino by just 12 senators, declaring that “the constitutional grant to the Senate of the power to elect its own president [is a power that] should not be interfered with, nor taken over, by the judiciary.” It emphasized: “The Court will not sally into the legitimate domain of the Senate on the plea that our refusal to intercede might lead into a crisis, even a revolution.”

Different

That case happened 77 years ago, under a different Constitution (the 1935 one), and involved factors so totally different from the present case: The then-Senate president Avelino walked out of the session, followed by some of his allies, precipitating an immediate vote to remove him. One senator at that time was sick and in the US, so it was practically impossible to reach him immediately by phone to get his vote. The current Supreme Court therefore might decide to rule that since the case involves an issue of interpreting the Constitution, it has the right to rule on it.

Shrinking the chamber to 22 and 12 becomes a majority; keeping it at 23 and 12 is merely half, short of the 13 that real authority would require. This is the same arithmetic that hangs over the impeachment of the vice president, where the question of whether two-thirds means 15 of 24 or two-thirds of some smaller, curated number will decide everything. The tactic is being rehearsed in plain sight: control which bodies are counted and you control the result. Redefine the denominator and any minority can call itself a majority.

And what is the real use of this newly invented authority? A purge. Every committee chairmanship was declared vacant and handed to the bloc’s own. Most telling of all, the Blue Ribbon Committee — the panel investigating the flood control corruption scandal now battering the administration — was taken from Pia Cayetano and given to Erwin Tulfo, who is not a lawyer.

The committees that matter, the ones that investigate, that subpoena, that shape the record, were captured in a single afternoon. This was not the routine housekeeping of a chamber reorganizing itself. It was the seizure of the instruments of inquiry by the faction that Marcos favors, executed on the one day of the calendar when scrutiny would be lowest.

The timing is not incidental; it is the entire point. Sen. Sherwin Gatchalian, the nerdy son of a controversial Chinese-Filipino billionaire as acting Senate president, will preside over the impeachment court trying Sara Duterte. The same maneuver that conjured a leadership change out of an absence has also delivered the gavel of the impeachment trial into the hands of the Marcos bloc most determined to see her convicted.

Fingerprints

The Palace’s fingerprints are all over the Senate’s premises. Within the hour, Malacañang “recognized” the new majority and the leadership of “acting Senate President” Gatchalian. But it is not the president of the Republic’s place to recognize a Senate president. The Senate, under the Constitution, chooses its own leaders; that autonomy is not a courtesy but a structural guarantee, the thing that keeps the legislature from becoming an annex of the executive.

When Malacañang rushes to anoint one claimant over another in a leadership dispute it plainly has an interest in, it is not observing the separation of powers. It is erasing it. A Senate whose president is effectively certified by the president is no longer a coequal branch. It is a department.

That raises the suspicion that the Ombudsman had rushed the graft cases against Estrada and Escudero to pressure them to defect to the Marcos bloc. There are rumors that Escudero capitulated as he was told that the Ombudsman would be extending the graft charges to include his celebrity wife Heart Evangelista.

That is the real danger — the weaponization for a president’s agenda, the very tools for upholding a democracy’s system of checks and balances, which would outlast this episode and go down in history as the Senate’s darkest episode.

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Marcos’ Senate bloc thinks Filipinos are stupid
Source: Breaking News PH