There is something unseemly in the way the campaign for the speakership of the House of Representatives in the 18th Congress is devolving.
One incoming lawmaker from Metro Manila insists that he has a term-sharing agreement with another lawmaker, and that President Rodrigo Duterte has signed off on the deal. Going on TV talk shows, the incoming congressman—a former senator and a recently resigned Cabinet member—says the agreement calls for him to take the first 15 months of the three-year term, while the other contender would take over the second part of the term, for 21 months.
This other lawmaker, who also aspires to the position, has denied that such an agreement exists—prompting the Metro Manila congressman to call him a liar. The President himself has confirmed the agreement, even as this other lawmaker backed out at the last minute.
“It's okay if he lies because politicians lie,” the Metro Manila lawmaker told a cable news public affairs program. “I was watching him here. But to call the President [a] liar by saying there's no such agreement, I'll not take that sitting down.”
Pointedly, both lawmakers belong to the ruling PDP-Laban, the party headed by the President, which has 84 seats in the 304-member House.
These details are significant in several ways.
First, even with 84 seats—the largest number in the House—the PDP-Laban cannot on its own form a majority to elect a speaker, and needs the votes of its traditional allies from other parties to obtain a supermajority. The prospects of this happening diminish if the PDP-Laban itself cannot agree on one candidate.
Second, the President himself has not seen fit to endorse a single candidate from his party, and has said he would not do so. With one word, he could have settled the issue, but for his own reasons, he chose not to do so.
Third, and just as significant, the President could have confirmed or denied the existence of a term sharing agreement to establish to all and sundry who has been lying. Again, he has not done so.
Now, the President’s own son says he wants to be Speaker, to bring unity to his father’s party.
Strangely, however, he speaks of term sharing, too—among representatives of Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao—in an arrangement that presumably would split the three-year term of Speaker by the same number of years, an arrangement that would further divide rather than unite the House and the nation.
Lost now in all this politicking is any talk about qualifications—or the freedom among lawmakers to choose their own leader. Are newcomers with no or little experience in Congress truly qualified to lead it? What experience do they have to adequately prepare them for the prickly work of gaining consensus among the diverse membership of the House to further the administration’s legislative agenda?
To listen to the lawmaker from Metro Manila talk, it would seem like the individual views of lawmakers do not matter, and that the leadership question has already been settled in some private backroom negotiation. It is easy to talk up the allure of youth and enthusiasm, and just as easy to forget that wisdom is a key qualification for leadership.
Might Congress—and the people—be better served if the leadership issue were settled based on the qualifications of the aspirants and the free will of lawmakers to vote their conscience?