By Robert B. Roque, Jr.
While the circus that unfolded in the Senate last Monday appeared to be triggered by Senator Ronald dela Rosa’s frantic reappearance after six months in hiding, even the blind can see the larger game at play: wresting control of a Senate now inching closer to convening as an impeachment court for Vice President Sara Duterte.
Bato’s resurfacing decisively secured the numbers to enthrone Alan Peter Cayetano as Senate President and fortify a pro-Sara bloc scrambling to consolidate power before impeachment proceedings begin — if at all.
Ugly in all aspects, we saw the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) and the Senate Sergeant-at-Arms practically at each other’s throats. One, acting to arrest Bato; the other at war with itself in the middle of a Senate leadership change before cementing itself as a political safehouse for the Chamber’s wanted member.
Yes, Dela Rosa is saved by the bell. Or rather by the gavel of Cayetano, placing him under “protective custody” as though the institution itself had become a sanctuary from accountability.
Cayetano’s claim that “no senator was ever arrested” inside the Senate complex! But obviously, former senator Antonio Trillanes IV knows history better — because he lived through it. He was arrested in 2018 while the Senate was in session, with police officers even reading him his Miranda rights beside the session hall itself. Former senator Leila de Lima was also arrested in 2017 during the Duterte years under charges that would later collapse in court after witnesses recanted and admitted coercion. And during those years, who stood among the chief enforcers of that climate of political persecution? None other than then-PNP chief Ronald dela Rosa himself.
That is what makes today’s outrage from the Duterte bloc almost comedic. What was perfectly acceptable when political opponents were being hauled away is now supposedly an assault on democracy because one of their own is cornered by an ICC warrant.
And mind the gall of Senator Bato, who — after playing live-action Temple Run with the NBI through the stairs and hallways of the Senate — dared complain about people questioning whether he still received his salary during six months of disappearance from public life.
Instead of sounding offended, he should be sounding apologetic. Whether or not he ultimately collected the money is no longer the point. The issue is that for half a year, he abandoned the sworn duty entrusted to him by the Filipino people as legislator while conveniently disappearing amid rumors of an arrest warrant over the very drug war that left thousands dead under former president Rodrigo Duterte.
And yes, legitimate questions must also be raised about the ICC itself. Why does it operate in such a secretive, almost mischievous fashion — concealing or denying the existence of warrants until targets suddenly surface? Transparency matters in the pursuit of justice, especially in politically explosive cases such as this.
But supporters of justice for EJK victims would likely counter that such tactics become necessary precisely because of how slippery personalities like Dela Rosa have become — a senator who supposedly spent months “in the mountains reading the Bible,” according to his own camp, while the nation he was elected to serve continued functioning without him.
And yet, he is now being coddled by perhaps the oddest coalition in recent Senate memory — a laughable party of uncanny senators who individually have almost nothing in common except that each has faced public scorn, controversy, or political baggage of their own. Mutual protection, it seems, is the only ideology left.
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