The Senate presidency

ENQUIRY
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

The Senate presidency
Sunday, 07 11, 2010

Except for the occasional upset stomach, there seems to be nothing wrong with the health of the new President. The new vice president, too, is obviously hale and hearty, especially now that he’s not going to have rashes because he’s moving to the Coconut Palace. So the talk of a yet to be elected Senate president eventually succeeding to the presidency is a long shot—nay, impossibility—within the next six years of the Aquino administration.

What is important here and now is the issue of qualification and acceptability. Can the next Senate president succeed in maneuvering with skill and care the expected internecine dissensions of our present crop of senators as they discharge their role in nation building, pursue an agenda of reform and change, at the same time uphold the independence of the chamber?

This ability to keep things on an even keel should be the primary consideration in the determination of who should lead the Senate in the Fifteenth Congress.

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Closeness to the President of the country is a disqualifier. A senator who himself admits to having asked the permission and blessing of President Aquino to run for Senate president only betrays his dependency on the President. Notice the word: dependency, as in a need for an authority figure so strong that it becomes necessary to have this figure prompting and guiding one in order to function properly.

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And I fear what would happen if the relationship turns into a co-dependency. Political analyst Leina de Legazpi says, “Surely, we’ll have a pattern of detrimental executive-legislative interactions within a dysfunctional political relationship.” Or as one senator succinctly points out, “If you have a Senate controlled by Aquino, where is the [expletive muffled] independence?”

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Tough talk makes a good campaign pitch. So the chosen candidate of the Liberal Party (LP) for Senate president says he will constitute an “activist” Senate, one that “seeks solutions to the nation's decades-old ills.” But these words are mere sound and fury, cock-and-bull, when measured against past performance.

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For instance, can a senator do well as Senate president and truly lead a Senate of the people, when he had been responsible for foisting on the nation a bogus president when he just smugly noted the massive fraud in a previous electoral exercise?

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May a senator, who has contributed nothing significant in the various investigations in aid of legislation conducted by the Senate, be expected to be an activist leader of a Senate that is transparent and accessible to our countrymen?

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May a senator responsible for squelching many activist initiatives of the Senate—for instance, the pursuit of criminal action against those responsible for the forgery of documents in the National Archives to question the citizenship of a presidential candidate—be expected, like the anecdotal tiger, to change his predatory stripes and now maneuver the Senate to take a different tack in similar situations confronting it?

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May a senator who, because of his immaturity and lack of anything between his ears, dawdled and dallied and did not have any significant part in the harvest of legislative initiatives contributory to education upgrading, poverty alleviation, peacebuilding, etcetera, have the expertise and gravitas to claim that the Senate under his leadership would be productive at all?

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The nation needs a Senate president like this like it needs a hole in the head.

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What the nation needs is an independent reformist Senate. It is the only institution that can stand up to the other institutions of government. No institution could effectively perform a check-and-balance function other than the Senate.

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And at the helm of the Senate must be an intelligent senator with an independent mind, someone who could ride into the storm with concentration; present with determination a genuine and strategic legislative reform agenda; see things with clarity and foresight; and with calm tenacity, prioritize laws that will propel the country’s growth, create jobs and ensure the delivery of basic social services.

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That’s a tall order, but it fits nicely with what Senator Edgardo Angara said in a recent statement: “For the Senate presidency, we’re looking for someone who will uphold the dignity and independence of the institution, who will lead a reformist agenda and someone who will not just criticize for the sake of criticism. We will pick someone who will act for the higher interest of our country and the Senate as an institution.”

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Way back in the Ninth Congress (1992-1995), Angara led a Senate independent of the Executive. That Senate then was an activist legislature, churning out a host of reform bills signed into law by President Ramos (who belonged to another party), and catapulted the country to new heights, not the least of which was being brought right to the doorsteps of the exclusive club of tiger economies. Despite this legislative-executive rapproachement, Ramos was not spared the knives of the senators probing into the shenanigans in his administration.

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We are now in the Fifteenth Congress, 15 years later. The LP of President Aquino has only 4 members in the Senate. Obviously, they cannot elect a Senate president. If the mood of the voters who elected the 20 other senators not belonging to the LP is to be honored in these people-empowered times (“Kayo ang boss ko”), the choice of Senate president should not be on the behest of Malacañang. The LP should not tamper with that, by bringing the weight of President Aquino or the presumptive closeness of a party member to him.

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Let a non-LP senator be the Senate president. Only with him can the Senate be truly the people’s voice, an effective and productive partner of President Aquino in nation building. Last but best of all, with a non-LP Senate head, the people would have the calm assurance that no quarters will be given to accommodate, or play footsie with, any one in or out of the Executive department who might be tempted to reprise a Jocjoc, a Garci, or a Neri.

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Letter to President Aquino

ENQUIRY
DEMAREE J.B. RAVAL

Letter to President Aquino
Sunday, 07 04, 2010

Dear President Aquino:

Forgive me for not addressing you by the moniker that millions of Filipinos now seem to have embraced in reference to you. I am referring to the hyphenated P-Noy, a term coined when the incontrovertibility of winning was a clear and present blessing and no longer an arguable proposition. You have campaigned as Noynoy, true. And I could bet that somewhere in our archipelago of 7,700 islands inhabited by 94 million Filipinos, there are still quite a good number who do not know that your full name is Benigno Simeon Cojuangco Aquino III.

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You are and always will be Noynoy to millions, and now that you are president what could come easier and smoother to the tongue than P-Noy? Admittedly, if one cares to style your initials in the fashion of that which the press and obsequious staffers referred your predecessor, the P-Noy tag is much better. Could you imagine PBSCA III? Horrific! Or BCA, as in the FVR of President Ramos? Not likely. With P-Noy, the assonance is so euphonious that the term becomes at once a contraction of Pinoy, the popular term which we Filipinos now proudly call ourselves here and abroad. So by clever coinage: P-Noy. P(resident) Noy(noy), the current iteration of the proud Pinoy. P-Noy, President of the Philippines.

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It saddens me sometimes that we Pinoys have arrived at a stage in our culture where addressing people by their formal names is taken as a sign of condescension or snobbishness. “Hey, Cruz, could you see me at my office?” would strike an offended chord in one’s self-esteem, so we go: “Hey, Johnny, could you see me at my office?” There — that’s betterer, as my friend Leina de Legazpi would say; it doesn’t smack of any hint of haughtiness that, our ancestors used to think, characterized the speech of our former imperious, patronizing colonists when they addressed the peasantry.
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Oh, we’d like to be known as a race of smiling people whose very pores are oozing with friendliness on every occasion. So we prefer the familiar to the formal. We become so cloyingly familiar and friendly with our public officials that it becomes de rigueur to address our mayors as Jojo, our undersecretaries as Jocjoc, and our senators as Nene even in instances when the form of address or honorific for the official rank demands it. I can almost imagine it: “Ladies and gentlemen, it is a great honor and privilege for me to introduce…P-Noy!” Or in news bulletins: “P-Noy yesterday announced that it is the foremost duty of his government to lift the nation from poverty through honest and effective governance.” I wonder how we sound to other nations when they hear, or read, about this reverse condescension!

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Or, is it just me who is uneasy about this widespread usage? After all we saw Dwight Eisenhower in the ’50s referred to as Ike and, of recent memory, Corazon Aquino as, in endearing fashion, Cory.
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But P-Noy? Maybe I’ve grown much too plebeian or too philistine in my tastes, but the appellation simply sticks in my throat. I know I’m swimming against the tide here and would probably lose a handful of friends in my profession and in this vocation that currently finds untrammelled expression in The Daily Tribune, but I find the appellation d’origine controlee, as it were, (if we were talking about wines) too heady and difficult or impossible to accept.

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However, the supposedly endearing term has been unleashed and has become a pervasive idiolect, an accepted coinage among those who voted you into office. It is now my fervent hope that someone in Malacañang would write a nicely worded, fine-tuned circular to the members of the working press that the term sounds too contrived (or too jejemon, as our youngsters would say) and an unceasing repetition of it might eventually become a source of continuing annoyance to those in your official family, if not you yourself, Mr. President.

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Having unloaded that silly baggage off my chest, Mr. President, let me tell you that even people in this part of the world, Kyrgyzstan, where I’m writing from, were properly impressed by your inaugural address, even when I had to grope for the right idiom in English to translate to them your forceful Pilipino. Thanks to the WorldWideWeb we were just a mouse-click away from history being made in the Philippines. Later, we watched you on YouTube gamely singing a melodiously tricky song that was aptly titled “Watch What Happens.” And juxtaposing speech to song, they told me: “This president bears watching.”
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Mr. President, we will watch you from now on. Never mind if the first 100 days of your administration is supposed to be a period of grace, a traditional honeymoon, an initial period of intense approval and goodwill accorded to presidents at the start of their jobs. We, the Filipino nation — your boss as you yourself said so — have scarce time to wait and see. Our watch has begun.

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We will watch you because the Filipino people believe in you and you let them hold your outstretched hand.

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We will watch you because the heart of the nation resonate to your campaign battle cry that there is no poverty if the government is graft-free.

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We will watch you because you have promised the beginning of a regime that is not deaf and dumb to the appeals of the people.
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We will watch you not because our eyes are still bedazzled and bewitched by the Cory Magic, but because we are resolved, as you are perhaps equally determined, not to break our hearts or dash our hopes again.

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Yes, Mr. President, we will watch what happens, and we hope that we will be there — as active participant or thankful beneficiary — when it happens.

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