Notice something about our senators?

The Senate is getting bitchy of late. In a fiscal crisis when citizens are donating aid but seeking leadership, senators are picking fights, pinning blame and preaching disunity.

Senate President Frank Drilon, for one, is usually calm. But he raised eyebrows recently by calling Energy Sec. Vince Perez "inutile". This, when the latter rued that RP can’t do much if oil prices rise due to factors beyond its control: terrorism in Saudi Arabia, civil war in Iraq and Nigeria; strife in Venezuela, Russia’s jailing of its biggest oil tycoon, China’s demand surge, America’s summer driving frenzy. A way out is alternative fuel from local sources like coconut or sugarcane ethanol, Perez explained, but it needs big capital. Whereupon cool Sen. Mar Roxas snapped that energy men should do something similar to his importation, as one-time trade boss, of cheap medicines from India for sale in state hospitals. Through their vitriol, Perez must have wondered how to get cheap oil from the OPEC cartel, for retail in non-existent government gas stations.

This week Drilon called Palace deputy spokesman Ric Saludo an "ignoramus" on debt capping. The latter wondered why, when he had affirmed that the Senate head’s idea to limit government borrowings was well within Congress’ power, but that, meantime, Malacañang already was cautiously limiting borrowings based on paying capacity. Only later did he find out that Drilon didn’t like the headline of a news story, "Palace official hits debt cap proposal," over which Saludo had no say.

Usually cheerful Senate deputy Juan Flavier, too, spewed venom in a radio interview about short supply of medicines in government clinics. It’s a malady he too couldn’t solve during his stint as health secretary. For days Sen. Manuel Villar has been blaming imagined Malacañang spin doctors for the clamor against pork barrels, ignoring that the press and public for over a decade have been crying for abstention. This time it’s Press Sec. Ignacio Bunye who’s wondering what made Villar livid, when he even defended the pork as "pro-poor" and earned scathing editorials for it.

A Congress reporter opines that with crisis at hand, the senators are fighting for political survival. "They feel Malacañang didn’t defend them enough on the pork issue, and even cut their shares by 40 percent in the 2005 budget bill," he says. "Yet the Palace also wants them to pass eight tax measures that will make them villains in the public eye. So they’re pointing at the President’s discretionary funds, wrong policies, inefficient officials, and Napocor’s P1.2-trillion losses."

That’s like Christ’s holy anger at the Temple defilers. Then again, not so. Villar has recruited Sen. Ralph Recto to hit back at the huge salaries in state firms – while they keep their pork slabs.

The bitchiness isn’t directed at the executive alone. Still on the pork, Sen. Miriam Santiago is railing for an unprecedented investigation of what transpired in a caucus last week of leaders in the House of Representatives. She smells a rat in their announcement to abolish the pork in 2005, and thus wants them hauled to the Senate for grilling. Sen. Joker Arroyo has his own target: Rep. Joey Salceda who advises Malacañang on the economy. Fuming against new taxes, he growled at President Gloria Arroyo: "Stop relying on your resident Rasputin from the House who irritatingly keeps on making economic analyses of matters already known."

The meanness is getting personal, if not whimsical. If you say "hi" to a senator, you’d better be ready to back it up. Sen. Serge Osmeña suddenly burst from left field that Mrs. Arroyo is rotating the Cabinet from among cronies of her husband. His proof: the transfer of chairman Bernardo Abes from SSS to GSIS, and Thelmo Cunanan from PNOC to SSS. Abes, once a labor chief of Mrs. Arroyo’s father, President Diosdado, is a confidante of her family, not her husband’s. Cunanan was never close to the First Gentleman. Both are not of cabinet rank. That didn’t matter to Osmeña. He ranted on that Cunanan lost billions of pesos as PNOC head, contrary to audited financial statements submitted to him as far back as January that PNOC has profited and holds cash by the billions. He also claimed that the SSS chair’s salary is P500,000 a month–not true since the post merits only a per diem, while the president’s pay is pegged at P100,000.

Minority Leader Nene Pimentel, meanwhile, is accusing Mrs. Arroyo of Constitutional breach in appointing department secretaries after her June 30 swear-in without first submitting them for Congress confirmation. Truly, who would have run the offices when Congress convened only on July 26 and has yet to form the Commission on Appointments?

Fact and reality do not matter. What’s important is a senator’s ability to display truthfulness to the adulating public from mere gesture and tone. Show a senator a picture of your children, and within half an hour he’ll convince you that they aren’t your kids. More so with the Senate’s special brand of nastiness. Anger, Elizabeth I said, makes dull men witty.

One would hesitate to counsel the senators to speak softly but carry a big stick. For they just might–carry a big stick, that is. That’d spell bigger trouble. Imagine what could have happened then, when action star Sen. Lito Lapid likened Senate debates to movies with heroes and villains, and well-bodyguarded Sen. Juan Ponce Enrile warned him to pipe down. Or what could have been the climax when ex-police general Sen. Fred Lim called the majority greedy, and ex-military general Sen. Rodolfo Biazon told him to take it back or else.

The senators don’t mind that hatred begets hatred, which a nation in crisis can’t afford. Then again, as Josef von Sternberg said, the only way to succeed is to make people hate you. Legislators in Japan, Korea and Taiwan routinely maul each other. Is that why their economies are successful?

* * *

Catch Sapol ni Jarius Bondoc, Saturdays, 8 a.m., on DWIZ (882-AM).

* * *

E-mail: [email protected]