Band of brats

Our Congress has seen no uglier sight than what unfolded before us Tuesday afternoon at the House of Representatives.

A Band of Brats, vainly trying to stall a vote at the House Justice Committee, deployed every form of theatrics and every excuse to filibuster. In the process, they broke every rule of proper decorum, capped by a riotous walkout that led the minority into the arms of foam-in-the-mouth leftist groups hallucinating of a revolution.

That walkout was obviously contrived.

Earlier in the day, anti-Arroyo groups gathered for a mass officiated by an over-politicized bishop. Leftist groups massed before the gates of the Batasan. Actress Susan Roces materialized at the session hall. A team of militants created a ruckus at the gallery.

Then the Band of Brats walked out, rudely throwing documents in the air and mouthing invectives.

It was immediately clear what the minority was up to. They wanted to re-create the hysteria that broke out after the debate over the "second envelope" during the Estrada impeachment. But the whole effort flopped.

The public is sick and tired of all the grandstanding going on. It is pure fiction peddled by the opposition that one impeachment complaint is stronger than the other. All the complaints are equally trite and deserving of the trash bin.

Only the communists want an uprising to break out in the streets and somehow resuscitate their failed dreams of leading a revolution. And then there are not enough of them.

The communists have yet to realize that everything they touch turns to dust. The more they overwhelm this process with their silly gimmicks such as exorcising the House, passing around pink flowers and disrupting solemn proceedings with their sloganeering, the greater the inclination of the general public to tune out.

The public suffers from an overdose of event-engineering designed to capture media attention. The public endures the lack of substance in the long-winded, excessively contrived speeches of the minority who want to clutter the proceedings with every stray rumor they could find.

In a last desperate attempt to stall the vote, for instance, Rep. Ace Barbers wanted to summon former DWSD secretary Dinky Soliman and presidential political adviser Gabriel Claudio to give testimony before the Justice Committee. He wanted to convert a deliberative committee into an investigative committee looking into claims made earlier in the day by Soliman, claims that are in the last analysis unimportant.

While Barbers was clearly out of order, the fact that he was shut down to give way to a vote was transformed into the causus belli for a walkout.

The minority did not want a vote. They wanted this stupid melodrama to just go on and on, at great public expense and distraction.

They did not want a vote because they would lose it. They were afraid of democracy.

They would rather threaten and intimidate to get their way. They tried intimidating their colleagues in the majority by accusing them of selling out.

They threatened an uprising in the streets. But that was not waiting when they walked out of the Batasan building. All that was there are those desperate leftists aching for a riot.

Not finding a ready uprising in the streets, the Band of Brats are now saying they would return to the proceedings only if the "amended complaint" they prefer is the one given preference by their colleagues in the majority.

In short, either they get their way or they continue with their crazy tantrums. Their arrogance dies hard.

But, alas, arrogance cannot substitute for competence. The minority earlier sneered at the impeachment option than belatedly filed an "amended complaint" they wanted to bulldoze at the expense of the other complaints dutifully filed ahead of theirs.

The harder the minority pushes their childish theatrics, the more they lose their tactical options.

If they don’t participate in the deliberations, the deliberations will move on anyway. All that is important is that the majority musters a proper quorum.

With no uprising ready in the streets and having antagonized their colleagues in the majority, the Band of Brats now find they have grossly less room for maneuver. All they can do now is to hold a press conference everyday, risking boring the public to a state of absolute catharsis.

The greater peril this Band of Brats could inflict on themselves is that they could completely devastate their own credibility by overplaying their weak hand. They will build mountains out of molehills, produce more heat than light and create more noise than substance. They will insult their colleagues even more and eventually insult the public’s intelligence by their vain efforts to sustain a lost cause.

The Band of Brats appears willing to burn down our institutions to the ground if only to keep their gimmickry in play. They do not seem to be willing to be restrained by the sheer inanity of what they say only to gain media space and win name-recall in furtherance of their own political ambitions.

The Band of Brats must be returned to kindergarten or to obedience school where they might yet learn the basics of rules and procedures. Or else they will continue to set bad examples for the nation’s young.

At some point, they must realize that bad manners cannot revive vain causes.

Those of us who watched the sad events of Tuesday afternoon at the House of Representatives ought to be convinced we should not help export this Band of Brats to the Senate in the next elections, although this might be what they devoutly wish for.

They are hazardous to the nation’s sanity.