[Pastilan] Jinggoy and the Cayetano group’s ‘force manure’

Alan Peter Cayetano made a complete fool of himself on Monday, June 1, as he tried to stop law enforcers from serving a Sandiganbayan arrest warrant on Senator Jinggoy Estrada.

It was almost painful to watch.

Here was a Senate president — someone who had just lectured another senator about voice volume — shouting at the top of his voice and waving his arms around as if these were enough to somehow override a court order. Just days earlier, he and Senator Robin Padilla were crying foul over Senator Kiko Pangilinan’s tone during a Senate debate. Yet there was Cayetano, tossing aside his own standards the moment they became inconvenient.

His argument on Monday was as ridiculous as it was childish.

He pleaded with authorities to simply walk about five minutes outside the Senate before carrying out the arrest, as though a valid warrant suddenly becomes invalid depending on distance from the chamber. The whole thing had the feel of a little boy’s tantrum, trying to negotiate for a toy his parents had already said no to.

Then came Cayetano’s justification, and it was worse.

His claim that no senator had ever been arrested inside the Senate was a falsehood — carefully wrong. 

He reached back to the 1990 Salonga episode as if it were some kind of founding charter of Senate immunity. Then-Senate president Jovito Salonga, with whom Cayetano is an intellectual dwarf in comparison, objected to the serving of a warrant on then-senator Juan Ponce Enrile inside the Senate in connection with the 1989 attempt to overthrow the administration of Corazon Aquino. 

Salonga had directed Senate guards to block law enforcers from entering during the session. But this was never anything like a constitutional doctrine; it was, at most, a procedural objection in a moment of political strain in a country still shaking off authoritarian habits. Enrile subsequently surrendered outside the chamber.

What makes Cayetano’s argument dishonest is what he chose to leave out. During the Duterte administration, then-senator Leila de Lima yielded and was served a warrant inside the Senate premises. Another, Antonio Trillanes IV, was even more direct — a warrant was served, his Miranda rights were read inside the Senate’s executive lounge, and he left with law enforcers in the most matter-of-fact way imaginable.

To pretend these did not happen is selective memory being used to back up an assertion. Cayetano’s use of the Salonga-Enrile case was cherry-picking in service of a weak claim, giving away his real point about exceptions —  the idea that senators somehow belong to a more delicate category of people when the law comes calling. 

He wraps this in lofty language about institutional dignity and co-equal branches of government, but what it actually amounts to is a demand for special treatment. That, Cayetano failed to see, is the very definition of impunity.

Then Interior Secretary Jonvic Remulla delivered the response that sucked the air from Cayetano’s argument. He pointed out that whatever claim the Senate had to privilege (read: special treatment) had already been squandered the moment it placed Senator Ronald dela Rosa under “protective custody” and allowed him to evade accountability and the arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court. Correct — one does not get to invoke institutional dignity after using it as a shield from the law.

For a brief moment, Cayetano appeared completely stunned. He stood there pale, motionless, and seemingly at a loss for words while a law enforcer read Estrada his rights. Reality had entered the room, and it had no interest in accommodating his objections.

The warrant was served. The performance was over.

What exactly, I wonder, is the legal basis for Cayetano’s position? Is there actually a law that prevents the arrest of a sitting senator inside Senate premises? If there is, he never cited it. If there is not, then his argument boils down to little more than entitlement masquerading as principle.

Follow his logic to its natural conclusion and it quickly collapses.

Suppose a senator committed a crime — say murder — right in front of witnesses inside the Senate building. Are police officers supposed to wait outside until the suspect decides to leave? Does the law stop at the Senate’s front door?

The idea is so obviously absurd it is hard to believe anyone thought it was persuasive.

The Senate is not a sanctuary. It is not a church, a medieval castle, or a diplomatic compound beyond the reach of the law. It is a government building paid for by taxpayers. Senators are public officials, not a protected aristocracy.

A court-issued arrest warrant does not lose its authority because it crosses the threshold of the Senate. If they say the arrest was “politically motivated,” then they accuse the anti-graft court of being a Palace puppet, like it is unable to decide based on merits. (Take note, Sandiganbayan justices.)

What Cayetano seemed to be defending was not institutional dignity, but the idea that certain people deserve a softer encounter with justice than everyone else. And that, more than anything else, is what made the episode so revealing.

And what, may I ask, are the charges at the center of all this indignation by the Cayetano group on Jinggoy Estrada’s behalf?

Graft and plunder — the pretty ordinary, almost boring language of official corruption in a system that has long stopped pretending to be shocked by itself. Not some abstract claim of political persecution, but the familiar machinery of public office gone rotten at the edges and then all the way through.

In the Estrada case, it’s the well-worn ecosystem of questionable flood control projects and budget insertions, where public money doesn’t so much disappear as quietly get walked out the back door with professional ease.

Estrada is alleged to have received around P573 million from the scheme. It is a figure with a certain blunt force to it, the kind that cuts through rhetorical fog and procedural noise. And it is worth keeping in mind that this is what was being wrapped, however awkwardly, in Cayetano’s appeals to institutional dignity and sensitivity, as if the scale of the allegations should somehow soften the fact of enforcement.

Flood control corruption! Nope, the underdog card won’t work. Cayetano and Co. tried to protect someone repeatedly accused of plunder. That was too much BS; that was “force manure.”

And what was this other bit of nonsense about Jinggoy instructing the Senate secretary to withhold his salary? The anti-graft law is not exactly a cryptic document. It states plainly that any incumbent public officer charged with fraud “shall be suspended from office.” 

In other words, suspension is not an act of personal sacrifice to be volunteered for. It is a legal consequence. 

The same law further provides that only upon acquittal may the public officer recover the salaries and benefits withheld during the period of suspension. What Estrada was presenting as a gesture of principle was, in reality, simply what the law requires. Pastilan. – Rappler.com