Unraveling

Vice President Sara Duterte trended on X, formerly Twitter, on Tuesday evening. The hashtag #zerobudgetforOVP or Office of the Vice President was among the top trends.

By Wednesday morning, the hashtag #SaraDuterte was trending with 50,000 posts as X users expressed frustration and anger over the way she handled Tuesday’s six-hour hearing at the House of Representatives, which focused on the Office of the Vice President’s proposed P2-billion budget for 2025.

VP Sara would know for sure why she trended and while she may shrug it off, her handlers should know that trends on X hold a lot of importance as they give insights into what the public cares about, providing a real-time pulse on society.

Watching the hearing, one doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry and it would take more than one column piece to dissect the layers of pain that any nation-loving Filipino must have felt while watching the televised constitutionally mandated exercise by the House of Representatives.

The most painful and profoundly sad part of it all is the most obvious – our Vice President, the second highest official of the land, voted into office by 32 million Filipinos, not only refused to answer queries about the use of her office’s budget, but also threw a tantrum precisely because she was being questioned.

Her words, her body language and her overall presence exuded a kind of intense anger and irritation you might see only in say, your mother when you’ve done something so awfully wrong or your high school principal when you’ve violated the school’s rules and regulations.

In the case of the budget hearing, however, it was not the lawmakers – representing the public – who were in the wrong but VP Sara herself for refusing to answer the questions on how her office used its past budgets.

Her refusal was wrong on so many levels because one, she felt that she was exempt from being scrutinized, even if the budget she was asking for is funded by taxpayers’ money; and second, because she absolutely disregarded parliamentary courtesy.

Nobody, however, is exempt from scrutiny when it comes to taxpayers’ money, as Gabriela Women’s Party-list Rep. Arlene Brosas said during the hearing.

Our government officials must remember that public service is a public trust; that budgets are funded by taxpayers’ money and that nobody, indeed, is exempt from scrutiny – whether you are the president, the VP, the lawmakers or a small-town mayor.

What a sad state of affairs we’re in.

Princess Sara

Sadder, even more so, was when the Vice President asked that the chairperson of the “House finance committee” be the presiding officer of the hearing instead of Marikina City 2nd District Rep. Stella Luz Quimbo, the presiding officer of Tuesday’s hearing by the House committee on appropriations.

This was surprising, and perhaps an unprecedented move.

But most of all, it was a testament to VP Sara’s strong sense of entitlement, frustrated perhaps that she was in the hot seat and being grilled nonstop.

Perhaps, this is not something she is used to, having been Davao’s princess for the longest time.

This, however, is really about the use of taxpayers’ money. It’s about accountability and transparency. Crying politics or being politicized just doesn’t make sense. It matters more how the funds were utilized than whether or not lawmakers were politicizing the budget hearing.

Of course, some of them were politicizing it. They are all politicians after all, including the VP herself. As Aristotle, in his political studies, once said, human beings are by nature political animals “because nature, which does nothing in vain, has equipped them with speech, which enables them to communicate moral concepts such as justice which are formative of the household and city-state.”

VP Sara could have simply answered the questions if only to show her respect toward people’s money, and to the House of Representatives as an institution, regardless of the ongoing political drama between the Duterte and the Marcos camps.

But she has opted otherwise. The result is one big mess. What happens next is anybody’s guess.

It’s a sad time for our country and our institutions. It’s sad, too, that our lawmakers didn’t do enough to prevent the hearing from descending into chaos.

But how could they have prevented it? Some of them, perhaps too shocked to react, could not even compose a simple, coherent sentence – whether in English or Tagalog.

This also speaks volumes on the kind of lawmakers we have today. I imagine statesmen of decades past rolling over in their graves. But that’s another story.

Sad times, indeed.

At best though, the hearing was at least wildly entertaining, a dark comedy of sorts – just as it usually is here in our nation of 119 million when chaos gets the best of us.

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Email: [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @eyesgonzales. Column archives at EyesWideOpen on FB.