Only 12 senators will be voted in come May 2025. Of the current 23-strong Senate membership (after Sonny Angara was appointed DepEd secretary), seven are vying for reelection, four are graduating having served the two-term limit, and 12 are continuing on until 2028. Hence, in the wide or narrow field of senatorial candidates throwing their hats into the ring, it is a mad race for practically only five slots, including Angara’s.

In a study dubbed, “How voters combine candidates on the ballot: the case of the Philippine senatorial elections” by Clarissa David and Erika Fille Legara (2015), it reported on three types that dominate senatorial elections, namely: 1) celebrities, 2) incumbents, 3) dynastic personalities. The authors rightly concluded that incumbents, dynasties and celebrities populated most of the top 12 and the 2010 midterm election was proof of this.

If only five senatorial slots are for grabs, those likely to dominate the winning circle would be those who had previously served in the Senate, showbiz celebrities, or members of political dynasties. How can the likes of Rep. Rodante Marcoleta of SAGIP Party-List clinch a Senate seat when voters choose candidates by name recall, or worse, when voters fill in only five to seven names for senator in their ballots?

Marcoleta doesn’t fall under any of the three typologies that dominate senatorial elections — incumbents, celebrities, dynastic members. Is he a six-term congressional incumbent of national fame? As a weekly host of a TV show, Sa Ganang Mamamayan, does it raise him to celebrity status? If a son would replace him in Congress, will he then carry the badge of a dynastic family?

In short, there’s a need to calibrate if his popularity is hitting the roof under any or all of the three dominant types. There’s at least one lesser-known survey firm that put him in 12th place. But in both the Pulse Asia and SWS senatorial polls last September, Marcoleta was not in the magic 12.

Serious observers of trends have a reason to wonder whether Marcoleta could have had a better chance of winning the first time he ran for senator but quit in the middle of the race. For one, he was then President Rodrigo Duterte’s expressed choice, more so that he ran under the ruling party of DU30.

Another feather in Marcoleta’s cap was his reputed to have singlehandedly caused the non-renewal of the legislative franchise of giant ABS-CBN broadcasting network in Congress — a feat that could have gone the other way. The entire duration the ABS-CBN issue was in the public eye must have catapulted Marcoleta’s rise to public consciousness, garnering positive commentaries for his triumph.

In defending Vice President Sara Duterte on her questioned agency budget, Marcoleta lost important committee memberships and vice chairmanships. How can a Speaker of the House of Representatives even allow this to happen absent any clear or present danger inimical to the smooth functioning of committees? Could Marcoleta have been allowed to filibuster?

There must have been an “invisible hand” in all these political maneuvers. Historical antecedents starting with former Senate President Juan Miguel Zubiri’s ouster to VP Sara’s resignation from both her concurrent capacities as education secretary and vice-chair of an anti-insurgency task force to an aborted impeachment move against her all the way to Marcoleta’s removal from House committees do have one thing in common.

That “disobedience” to the powers-that-be is dealt with by the unwritten punishment of expulsion or an equivalent prejudicial sanction. No wonder the House of Representatives has navigated on a pre-plotted course designed to be subservient rather than critical to the excesses of presidential power.

Distorted checks and balances, a bogus separation of powers in the tripartite, a railroaded national budget — all these appear to be the symptoms of a highly domineering “power from above” rendering the tenets of democracy as mere cliché, public welfare by sheer lip service, good governance a grand fiction.

The same senators over and over again? Kaput!