Today marks seven days since Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano became Senate President. He has the distinction of being the fifth person in our legislative history to have occupied both the speakership of the House and the presidency of the Senate (the others being Manuel Roxas, Quintín Paredes, Jose Zulueta, and Manuel Villar). But the record everyone is waiting to see is if he will beat Camilo Osias’ 13-day record for the shortest Senate presidency. Cayetano has until May 24 to beat that shortest of stints.

Regardless of how long—or short—Cayetano’s Senate presidency lasts, last week’s chaos and confusion has already permanently determined how his assumption of power will be remembered: yet another milestone in the institutional degeneration of the Senate.

Three things used to keep senators on good behavior. The first was public opinion. The second was the force of tradition. The third was fear of the law.

Today, the opinion that counts is not that of the nation, but rather that of the political tribes that support you: if your echo chamber is happy, you will be OK. Yesterday, two forces molded public opinion: the near-universal reach of media and the not so much political, but more accurately moral, clout of civil society, which defined and granted respectability. Media has declined to the extent that only rarely, now, does it achieve the status of mass media; instead, we are isolated echo chambers, wanting to hear only what we want to hear. Ironically, in times of crisis, we recover, however briefly, a sense of being a shared community, precisely because we are being confronted by a crisis. Suddenly, there is a renaissance of reporting; temporarily, we are reminded that we do, overall, share values.

As for tradition, G.K. Chesterton eloquently said it “means giving a vote to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead,” which is another way of saying accountability to history should promote self-control, or adulting, if you will; the veneration of institutions should be a constraint on behavior. Until it isn’t. The more traditions are set aside, however, the weaker their power to dissuade becomes. Third, the consequences of lawbreaking, as elections used to prove, were political exile or even extinction; but as we’ve discovered, even the disgrace of conviction by the courts has its antidote—absolution by election.

All of these combine to suggest that last week’s mess didn’t begin last Monday. It began in 2001, when the Supreme Court tried to squeeze the toothpaste of People Power—the exercise of which logically should result in the abolition of failed institutions—back into the tube of the Constitution. It mutated further in 2015, when Oliver Lozano came up with self-impeachment to protect former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo from authentic impeachment. It mutated again in 2018, when quo warranto proceedings were revived from the pre-independence era to eliminate a chief justice as revenge for the authentic impeachment of her predecessor. It reached its current, virulent, form in 2025, when Sen. Francis Escudero simply redefined “forthwith” and proved nothing was impossible for those who defy tradition, scholarship, and logic.

Each evolutionary leap neutralized the three means to keep senators from behaving badly, and I’m sure every reader has their own variation of my list of examples. In each instance, there was a public outcry or at least significant public misgivings as to the outcome; in every case there was a lot of headshaking, hand-wringing, and exclamations of shock: “but the law says!”, “but it’s obvious that…”, “surely you can’t seriously think…”

It’s not that Cayetano’s Senate presidency was achieved through things like deals that proved worthless (as some claim, Sen. Loren Legarda expected to be Senate President thanks to the coup, only for Sen. Joel Villanueva to stampede Cayetano’s election) that disgusted the public. Such behavior is part of the Senate’s DNA. It’s that the motivation of the coalition that won, seemed to have everything to do with the vulnerability of so many senators to international or domestic law.

In the assistant fiscal mind of former President Rodrigo Duterte, he loved quoting that “He who is the cause of the cause is the cause of them all.” It’s made at least two senators vulnerable to international trial, and several more, to trial for innovations in diverting funds from public funds into private pockets.

Not even in 2001, in the second envelope vote, did there appear to be no difference between the judges and the about-to-be judged. Then, they just relied on technicalities, and brazened it out in the face of public indignation. Now, they prefer to “judge not, lest ye be judged,” insert chapter and verse about the devil quoting the scripture here.

Similarly, Cayetano did not negotiate a dignified surrender for Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa; he defied tradition and logic by having a lawmaking body refuse to honor a legitimate warrant of arrest, creating a state of siege ripe for exploitation through bad movie plot diversion to aid escape. Only to invoke God when it became clear he was either in on it, or taken for a ride, in either case, not so smart as he thought. There’s a word for this–see title.