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Thursday, March 28, 2024

The Senate OJT gang

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Miriam Santiago has left the building. That means the OJT gang has been given a license to take over the Senate.

Used to be, newbie senators kept quiet during their first year or so in office, being slightly awed by their veteran colleagues and mostly uncertain if they, too, already have the gravitas to take the floor. But if Leila de Lima (who is vying, right out of the gate, for Rookie of the Year honors) can lead an investigation just a month and a half after being sworn into office, then, damn it, any one of the not-so-Young Turks who have burst onto the Senate scene this year can grab the microphone and, you know, do the senatorial thingy.

Youth shall be served, after all. And that means Joel “Tesdaman” Villanueva, Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao and Risa “Still Looking for a Nickname” Hontiveros can grill witnesses and get face time on national television just like the controversial committee chairman herself, with varying degrees of success and intelligibility.

Mostly, it’s been shoddy. How can it not be, when Bam “Pagpag” Aquino can pretend to be a veteran statesman in these parlous days, after seeing in the De Lima probe an opportunity to shed his image as the main backer of that asinine plan to feed leftover food to the poor?

Antonio Trillanes can still barely keep up the pretense of being a real senator, forcing him to fall back on his days as a graduate of the military academy in order to dissociate himself from the rest of the clueless, barely logical and grammatical rookies. And because the mic-hogging newcomers are faring so badly, Alan Peter Cayetano suddenly comes across as a half-breed Jovito Salonga, if Salonga ever prefaced his questions with long-winded, tangential references to this or that before getting to the point—which Salonga, of course, never did.

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Of course, there are always real Senate vets like Panfilo Lacson who can make sense of the proceedings and provide insights to those seeking them. But even returning old-timers like Richard Gordon need some time to get back into the groove—Dick always talks a mean streak, but he needs to settle down and not attempt to craft legislation on the spot, by means of a single, long-winded speech on the floor.

In the center of it all, of course, is Manay Leila, she of the clipped-yet-elongated pronunciation and the self-conscious, lawyerly demeanor. De Lima soldiers on through the most soporific portions of this great yawner of an investigation, hell-bent on proving that if she can’t unsettle hardened police officials like Bato dela Rosa, she can at least torture every syllable she utters until it practically begs to be killed extrajudicially. 

If the De Lima hearings look like they’re getting nowhere, part of the reason is that most of the senators come across as abysmally unprepared and totally incomprehensible. Had Miriam been there, she should have taken to the podium very early on, raising her hands to the heavens and rolling her eyes at the idiocy of her colleagues.

But instead we have De Lima now and the rest of the Senate trainees. Unicameralism suddenly sounds really good.

* * *

Seriously, the most sense I’ve heard out of a senator’s mouth during the current hearings emanated from Lacson’s. The former PNP chief cautioned the Senate about acting as a brake to the Duterte administration as it pursues its war against crime and drugs.

Lacson said admiringly that he’s never seen anything like the current campaign against illegal drugs and that it would be shame if the Senate got in the way of a president who wants to do something radical about a long-festering problem. ‘’The momentum that the police gained over a short period through [the] life-risking work of fighting illegal drugs must not be deterred by legislative inquiries like what we are conducting right now,” the senator said.

The implication of Lacson’s statement, to me, is that because the Senate cannot summon drug syndicate leaders, vigilante groups and other criminals who may also have been perpetrating the recent killings, lawmakers have been unfairly grilling the police. It’s as if the Senate has already concluded that the police killed all of the thousand or so people who reportedly died violently since Duterte took office—an assumption that is unfair to the lawmen risking their lives to make a dent on crime.

Of course, policemen have also been correctly identified as the perpetrators of some of the killings—especially policemen involved in the illegal drug trade and the recycling of seized narcotics. But the Senate must first let the agencies tasked with investigating the police for killing drug suspects or drug users do their job, before calling for an investigation like the one now being conducted by De Lima.

That said, I’m tuning out the Senate hearings until they promise to lead to something really substantial, instead of being used as a free venue to showcase the talents (or lack thereof) of senators new and old. More interesting, in my opinion, will be the House investigation of how the New Bilibid Prison became the epicenter of narcotics manufacturing in the last few years.

I’m told there are even plans to screen a real video, instead of just flashing plain old pie charts. But that, so far, can’t be verified.

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