Still distracted by politicking

"Congress is so strange," Will Rogers once said, "A man stands up to speak and says nothing, nobody listens, and then they all disagree." When bombs exploded in Zamboanga and Manila last weekend, a congressman got up to call the papers. "I have a great idea," he caws, "As soon as I get back to Congress on Monday, I will file a resolution to give the President emergency powers." He chuckles to himself as he puts down the phone, imagining the next day’s headlines he had just earned for himself. His unproposed proposal does see print. The President nixes it: "I don’t want it, I don’t need it, I have enough powers to deal with the situation." The Malacañang rejection notwithstanding, other politicians join the publicity fray. A senator screeches that emergency powers were the downfall of Ferdinand Marcos. Another tries to sound clinical when asked if he agrees with it, saying, "Well, yes and no." Still another warns that only Congress can grant emergency powers, so Malacañang had better watch it. For good measure, a radical sectoral representative raises a conspiracy theory that the President is contemplating martial law and is floating the idea through the first congressman. As people get more alarmed by the talk of military rule, a twice-retired senator and a spokesman of a disgraced party butt in with a call to sack the Armed Forces intelligence chief for not anticipating the bombings.

Politics is getting worse by the day. Legislators are voting themselves more and more pork and perks. They’re doing no real work for it, but it’s costing us a lot for them to do so. In the midst of terror attacks, rising fuel prices and falling incomes, they’re more concerned about press mileage. Instead of calming nerves or thinking up real ways to keep inflation down and purchasing powers up, they’re ringing up newsrooms to say "me, too" to this harebrained proposal or that unfounded protest.

Someone once analyzed that it’s all due to their short three-year terms. A congressman uses up his first year in office recovering what he spent for the campaign. On the second year, he’s already raising money for another run while keeping his name in the public eye. By the last year, he’s campaigning again. Some say this would end if we give them four years instead. But doing so might only give them an extra year to make money at our expense.

Besides, the problem of short tenures can’t be true for senators. They have all of six years. Yet that doesn’t make them buckle down to work, or stop them from being worse publicity hounds than congressmen.

The problem is more about knowing what their job entails. Legislators love to poke their noses into executive matters because, they argue, it’s all part of their oversight function. They think their primary work is to review each and every little thing the President and the Cabinet does. Their second task, they believe, is to get involved in name calling, mud slinging and back stabbing to earn the right to be called "Honorable." They forget that their foremost role is to make laws that define State policy. And if there are enough laws, to review and update these, to group related ones into codes, and to think of new ones to prod economic activity and equalize opportunities. But that may be expecting too much of our senators and congressmen. Legislating is real work that requires long hours of research and thinking and consultations. It’s far easier, in the name of oversight functions, to deliver an "exposé" and then pray that nobody notices when the subsequent committee investigation turns up nothing.

Some say the media are partly to blame. Newspapers make headlines of a politician’s silliest remarks. Radio shows did run man-in-the-street interviews about that emergency-powers ruckus. Then again, truly wise and sedate legislators can always turn down a television reporter’s request for reaction to whatever came out in the papers. More so if the questions are in the line of sabong journalism. Or if the unethical interviewer is a known undervocer PR counsel of another politician. But that again is expecting too much of them.

Others blame the uneducated masses. After all, it is said that a people only get the leaders they deserve. Vote a bum into Congress and you get a bum legislator. But in a modern age of sly publicity gadgetry used on a largely traditional feudal mindsets, can you really blame the people? Or should you instead blame legislators for making careers out of entertaining the alienated people with political circuses?

The bombings clearly are acts designed to disrupt our way of life and destabilize the government. In it’s wake, our political leaders must find ways to unite us, steel us, and guide us through. It is not the time for politicking that only distracts the people, and the lower executive officials whose job is to secure public places, gather preventive intelligence and arrest the bombers.

Politicians will always say, of course, that what we perceive as politicking is a misinterpretation of their serious concern for the people. The congressman who thought up the emergency powers thing cried hurted that Malacañang didn’t get it, that all he wanted was to help, especially if war breaks out in Iraq and oil prices triple and millions of overseas Filipinos lose their jobs. But why did he have to propose it through the press even before he filed a resolution? Why couldn’t he pick up the phone and instead talk straight to the President if the idea would be of help or not. After all, they’re partymates.

That only makes me suspect that the reason why so few women are in politics is because it’s too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.

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