The Senate blue ribbon committee dates to 1950. The political kingpin of Cavite, Justiniano Montano, set it up to investigate his party mate and leader, then President Elpidio Quirino, who’d already had a showdown with his Senate President, Jose Avelino, the year before. Montano, also the preeminent political boss of his era, apparently wanted a crack at Quirino, too. Manuel Manahan, who had a chance to investigate matters thoroughly later, concluded that Quirino would not go as far as bigwig political allies wanted him to go and paid a price for it in two ways: he got blamed by voters for corruption in the government, while political leaders from his own party undermined him for trying to limit their greed.

From its self-interested start, the blue ribbon committee has operated on the kind of logic that led then United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt to appoint Joseph P. Kennedy, a well-known stock market speculator and manipulator, as the first chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC): you need to “set a thief to catch a thief,” which turned out spectacularly well in the case of Kennedy, who turned the SEC and its rules into an effective, even feared, body.

But if it takes a crook to catch a crook, the crook doing that catching has to be the kind clever enough not to be part of the suspect line while doing the catching.

The previous blue ribbon committee, under the chairmanship of Sen. Panfilo Lacson, was like a boxer dancing around the ring with one hand tied behind his back: Lacson had a report in hand but lacked the signatures to release it and make it public before he was ousted.

The new blue ribbon committee is like a boxer with a torso but without arms or legs, only a head, its chair, Sen. Pia Cayetano. Its vice chairs, Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Rodante Marcoleta, its members, Senators Francis Escudero, Joel Villanueva, Mark Villar, and Camille Villar, not to mention Senators Imee Marcos, Robinhood Padilla, and Bong Go, are all in some sort of serious legal trouble one way or another.

The committee’s motto, “The truth shall set you free,” only works if everyone is convinced those under investigation have more to hide than those doing the investigating.

This is precisely the problem the newest crop of blue ribbon committee members is facing. The truth would quite likely make them not free. In the new upside-down world of the Senate, what will make senators free? If it isn’t the truth, then there must be untruths. This seems to be what an indignant Sen. Juan Miguel Zubiri was arguing when he heatedly responded to a breezy but sly Marcos manifestation, complete with a video as a visual aid.

The video put forward a conspiracy theory. The new minority was part of a plot to amend the Constitution, extend the participating officials’ terms, and neutralize the true, good, and beautiful defenders of democracy, the Dutertes and friends. Like all political untruths, it contains an irritating kernel of truth, all the better to stimulate the production of pearls of deceit: public anger and public pressure have, at long last, pushed the House to consider what it refused to consider for over a generation. It has finally opened up the possibility of an elected constitutional convention as a means to achieve Charter change (Cha-cha).

It doesn’t help that the latest installment of public disgust has led to the call in some less-than-thinking quarters for the abolition of the Senate or its transformation into a bigger version of the House by the restoration of the old pre-1935 senatorial districts. This is a direct indictment of the new majority to which Marcos belongs; so it is better to frame it not as public opinion, but as manufactured Palace opinion.

Both Marcos and Zubiri, having been elected by the entire country to an institution, the Senate, meant to foster a national perspective, know that public opinion matters and that public opinion has a shrewd way of detecting proposals in the interests of the politicians and not the people–and this includes things like unicameralism and parliamentarism, which have at their core a contempt for the electorate that has to give its stamp of approval for these changes to happen. Knowing this, the Senate has been steadfast in denying proponents the satisfaction of depriving the national electorate of its fundamental power to choose both the head of state and the upper house.

So Zubiri points out he’s never supported Cha-cha, an accusation Marcos was willing to make because it puts the minority on the defensive (I remember the late President Benigno Aquino III entertaining me with his example of an impossible political dilemma: a reporter comes up to you and demands, “Do you deny you murdered so-and-so?” Whatever your reply, he smiled, you’re already a marked man).

Zubiri was wrong, however, in denouncing Marcos and friends for turning the Senate into a “circus.” The Senate has been a circus many times in its history—so has the House, as has the Palace. It most recently became a circus when that fire-breathing crime fighter, Lacson, was reduced to running around the ring seeking signatures that wouldn’t materialize from colleagues who wouldn’t risk it. So you get a new committee composed of actual suspects, and you wonder why people think it’s like putting lipstick on a pig.