What is happening to our country?!?

PDI Editorial
6 February 2008

MANILA, Philippines -- Presidents have toppled Speakers before, but never in such gangland fashion. The removal of Jose de Venecia Jr. had all the elements of a Mafia assassination. False promises were made, not only to give De Venecia a false sense of security, but in order to deceive the public. Malacañang announced no action was to take place on Monday. In so doing, it hoped media and public attention would be deflected, and the risks of De Venecia making a harmful speech would be minimized since he wouldn’t have time to prepare, and the public wouldn’t be expecting it. The rubout would be neat, and clean.

This is why the impatience of Rep. Abraham Mitra of Palawan province was so unseemly, but so politically understandable. He swiftly moved to declare the speakership vacant, and then, during the two hours the session was adjourned, he kept urging its resumption regardless of procedures. In the caucuses that took place in the House during that two-hour lull, the marching orders from the Palace were clear: save congressmen some embarrassment by refusing a roll call vote, and deny De Venecia his swan song. But in the full glare of publicity, the Palace failed to achieve either. Instead of a surgical strike, every House member had to step up and do his part in the dirty deed.

We say dirty not in the sense that it was an unfitting end for De Venecia speakership -- the country gloried in his fall, we have to say. But in all the long history of bootlicking by the House of Representatives, never had it institutionally surrendered so abjectly, so cravenly, to executive influence as it did last Monday. For it elected, not just a Speaker handpicked by the Palace, which is par for the course, instead it elected three speakers: Prospero Nograles, and the Arroyo brothers, Mikey and Dato.

All the fig leaves meant to disguise the naked greed of the congressmen, all the orations about “reform” and “change” were shibboleths, words long stripped of their real meaning, concepts long ago discarded as outmoded by the House. They were excuses which time and again the congressmen who rose to register their votes revealed as secondary. To what? Their projects, their pork barrel. Taking turns to genuflect before the President’s sons, and their partners in politics, they voted not for change or reform, but for more of the same.

It was a vote of confidence in a system refined by the administration, with the enthusiastic participation, once upon a time, of De Venecia himself, where the House abandoned all fiscal independence and surrendered the power of the purse utterly to Malacañang. In that sense, De Venecia was killed by an instrument of his own making.

He shortsightedly believed that politics is a numbers game, not realizing, until the moment of his own political peril, that numbers in politics are written in the sand. He’d hoped to fatten his party at public expense, yet when another party proved better in mobilizing the cash, his party became an accomplice in his fall.

It’s a cautionary tale about power. But De Venecia’s fall is not the cause for public revulsion at what transpired in the House. Instead, it was the sight of old and young leaders united by avarice and blinded by ambition. The baptism into congressional politics received by the 84 neophytes at the House makes it truly deserving of what was said by Arsenio Lacson of Ernesto Maceda, who ironically sat as a witness to the Monday night rubout: “So young, and yet so…” All of them.

For the public, it was a sign that what the House has become will persist: a lapdog institution, with no sense of independence or integrity, heedless of its constitutional prerogatives. And of a unicameral pseudo-parliamentary system to come, ruled by a ruthless First Family of political buccaneers. No one can have any illusions, at this point, that their appetite, always unbounded, is now out of control.

We are reminded of how the Batasang Pambansa thundered its approval of Nicanor Yniguez’s proclamation of Ferdinand Marcos as the victor in the 1986 snap election. They were oblivious to the sentiment of the public, which consigned the dictator’s rubber stamp to the dustbin of history. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. was as cocky then as the Arroyo brothers are now.