THE House of Representatives seems hell-bent on completing the public humiliation of Senator Leila de Lima by dragging her before the chamber to answer the accusations against her, even at the risk of triggering a head-on collision with the co-equal Senate.
On Monday, Speaker Pantaleon Alvarez said he is ready to sign an arrest warrant against De Lima if she refuses to answer a show-cause order issued by the House committee on justice against her.
The committee, which is investigating the proliferation of illegal drugs in the national penitentiary when De Lima was still justice secretary, wants the senator to explain why she should not be held in contempt for advising a witness, her former bodyguard and lover, Ronnie Dayan, to go into hiding to avoid testifying before the House.
“This is the first time a senator meddled in the proceedings of the House,” Alvarez said. “No senator has ever advised a witness of the House to go into hiding.”
He said De Lima committed a breach of parliamentary courtesy by interfering in the proceedings in the House. The institution itself was insulted, he added.
Amid such threats, Senate President Aquilino Pimentel III issued a warning of his own, saying that the House was in breach of inter-chamber parliamentary courtesy.
He also bristled at how some congressmen, who urged him to discipline De Lima, were telling him what to do.
“We have our own rules,” he said, noting that the House has not even charged De Lima with anything. “For a member of the House to tell the Senate to do something—do your thing first before you ask us to do something.”
On Sunday, House Deputy Speaker Fredenil Castro said he did not think censuring De Lima would lead to a collision with the Senate, because it was De Lima who violated House rules by ignoring the summons to attend its hearings.
But an arrest warrant from the House against De Lima will most certainly test this exercise in wishful thinking. Instead of two chambers of Congress working together to pass needed legislation, congressmen and senators could be locked in internecine fighting that benefits nobody—least of all the public.
The root of the problem is that regardless of the Speaker’s assurances, the ultimate objective of the House committee on justice is not to arrive at the truth, but to destroy De Lima publicly. This was crystal clear in the salacious line of questioning that some of lawmakers took when they grilled Dayan, De Lima’s former lover.
One such lawmaker, a party-list representative of a group that ironically emphasizes the importance of education, said this week that he wanted to launch a congressional investigation into an online “mood meter” that showed that a news website’s readers were angry at him for posing pointless, misogynistic, and voyeuristic questions to Dayan. The ludicrous suggestion is indicative of the ugly mood that seems to hold sway among some members of the House—an inflated feeling of power and self-importance that trumps common decency and even logic.
In a privilege speech, this party-list lawmaker wasted even more public time and resources by admonishing the media to do our jobs properly.
In that spirit, we offer this simple observation: If De Lima is truly guilty of the crimes of which she has been accused, she should be haled before a court of law, not the House.
Now that we have done our job, we suggest that legislators put an end to the nonsense and do theirs.