Consider the Senate majority now led by Alan Peter Cayetano after the power seizure on Monday. It’s nearly identical to the grouping led by Francis Escudero that famously did in the first impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte. The Cayetano sibs. President Marcos Jr.’s estranged manang. The mother of the young Batangas lawmaker slapped with a billion-peso energy penalty. Rodrigo Duterte’s former general factotum. Joseph Estrada’s son. Etc. Is the stage set for a reprise?
Even the long-absent (but salary-drawing) Ronald dela Rosa was emboldened to complete the posse, ignoring his colleague Robin Padilla’s supposed advice not to emerge from wherever he was ensconced: Wag kang lilitaw.
In the Senate building, the man who commanded the national police during Rodrigo Duterte’s presidency and who struck terror in the hearts of petty pushers and users in the “war on drugs” that killed thousands was pursued by National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) agents intent on serving an arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court. He is accused along with others of being a co-perpetrator of the crimes against humanity committed during the war on drugs.
Hot pursuit
The attentive viewer gawking at CCTV footage of the formally dressed senator slipping and stumbling on his frantic way to the Senate session hall tailed by NBI agents may recall his memorable comment when a young child was reported killed by state forces in a drug raid: “Sh*t happens,” he said. On Monday he was reported furiously recounting the pursuit to his sympathetic peers and demanding that his harassers be driven from the premises.
It’s uncertain how long he intends to shelter behind Alan Peter Cayetano’s theoretical skirt, imprisoned as it were in the Senate’s protective custody. Surely he can’t be all that “happy to be back,” as he has enthused.
But then Franklin Drilon, a former Senate president and ex-justice secretary, says there is no such ruling designating the chamber as a sanctum sanctorum for its members in dutch with authorities. Even the trial lawyer Lorna Kapunan has been quoted as saying that police authorities can break open any building to get at their target.
Once upon a time, Leila de Lima demonstrated how a senator of the realm, although beleaguered, should comport herself. In 2016, after her justice committee launched an inquiry into the extrajudicial killings (EJKs) during Rodrigo Duterte’s war on drugs, her peers quickly voted 16-4-2 to remove her as committee chair. In the language of Alan Peter Cayetano, she was tarnishing the Philippines’ global image by calling attention to the EJKs. When she was arrested in February 2017 on criminal drug charges filed by the Department of Justice under Vitaliano Aguirre, she, herself a former justice secretary, faced her jailers with dignity and the integrity that kept her spirit unbroken for close to seven years in isolation. All the charges against her were eventually dismissed.
‘Bato’
Now here’s Dela Rosa—nicknamed “Bato”: hard as stone—back in the picture after making himself scarce for six months because of a then-rumored ICC arrest warrant (and getting paid for it). Did he perchance weep at this latest change in the Senate leadership (that he had helped engineer)?
In May 2024, when the rug was pulled out from under Juan Miguel Zubiri in favor of Francis Escudero, Dela Rosa was observed teary-eyed during Zubiri’s farewell speech, apparently so moved was he at the surprising turn of events. (Zubiri would later discover that Dela Rosa, who had promised support for him only days prior, was among the signatories to the resolution calling for his removal as Senate president. Such are the ways of political maneuvering.)
Vicente Sotto III’s own removal from the chamber’s No. 1 post had been bruited about for some time in view of two factors: the House of Representatives’ second impeachment of Sara Duterte (and the necessary convening of the Senate as an impeachment court) and the blue ribbon committee’s inquiry into the unprecedented corruption in flood control projects (and its recommendation that certain lawmakers including sitting senators be investigated). Up to last week, the report of the then committee chair, Panfilo Lacson, still lacked two signatures for it to make it to the Senate plenary.
No one’s talking
When Sotto’s ouster did come to pass, the general reaction was: They’ve actually gone and done it (and with such dramatic precision yet). But who among the new majority is defending the move? Maybe it’s time for Imee Marcos to present proof of the alleged million-peso bonuses and assorted benefits for House members who would vote for Sara Duterte’s impeachment? Who is explaining to the skeptical public the intelligence of replacing one Senate leader (who announced the quick convening of an impeachment court) with another (who took a significant part in the initial aborted exercise)? Escudero, apparently damaged goods, was no longer in the running.
Everyone’s all ears but no one’s talking, not even for the PR so vital to the business of self-projection. Loren Legarda, the new Senate president pro tempore, refuses to discuss the smooth power play with reporters, not even in broad strokes, as though it were a perverse transaction that had come down. And a photo vigorously making the rounds online of her and three others involved in the operation—Marcos, Camille Villar, Pia Cayetano: all of unlimited resources and now questioned motives—is quite unfit for image-making. It could be the overall vibe, or even the bad lighting, but the photo comes across as a display of compromised virtue.
So now Alan Peter Cayetano is on the line, along with his past. Rene Cayetano’s elder son is also a man of the law, but people remember his stint as House speaker and his refusal in October 2020 to honor a term-sharing agreement with Marinduque Rep. Lord Allan Velasco, until he was finally ousted. To think that the “gentleman’s agreement” had been brokered by then President Duterte himself.
Earlier, in 2019, he chaired the Philippine SEA Games Organizing Committee under which he had an “Olympic cauldron” built at a cost of ₱50 million. (Paltry, one could say, given the staggering amounts in stolen money, but think how it could have benefited the common folk in some way.) That and other intriguing stuff, including certain irregularities in the construction of the sports venue for the Southeast Asian Games hosted by the Philippines on Nov. 30–Dec. 11, 2019, are on record at the Commission on Audit.
But on Tuesday, Senate President Cayetano told reporters that “we won’t delay” the Vice President’s impeachment trial. He added an interesting point: “We have no reason to.”
Not that they, by their words and deeds all friends and allies of Sara Duterte, have legal grounds to do so. Leading lights of the law have warned against delay in the convening of the impeachment court to try her. The Inquirer reported that such luminaries as Adolfo Azcuna and Tony La Viña and the law deans of various universities have signed a statement asserting that, among other things, refusing to convene as an impeachment court could open the senators to administrative or criminal liability.
Let them finally do their constitutional duty. Let the evidence speak, let the numbers tell the story. CS
