Filibuster, forthwith

Filibuster, forthwith | Daily Tribune

If things had gone according to plan — if “plan” is what you could call it — then 16 June 2025 would likely have gone into the DAYS OF HELL roster of a disgruntled populace.

Imagine the scenario: A new EDSA rule for the Rebuild project, classes begin, and the rainy season commences. There is a joke that you know it’s almost the rainy season when infrastructure projects begin, making you wonder if there is a plan in there somewhere that you are not privy to.

Usually, it’s a road project or something that requires some digging, making you want to hurry them up before the floods come. Who schedules these things anyway? Certainly not artificial intelligence, which, even with incomplete algorithms, can make a better assessment for maximum efficiency. Maybe real people with unreal experiences?

Yet more than this nipped-in-the-bud fiasco that could have built up public rage like only years-long traffic can, the brewing fiasco happening now at the Senate is the kind that makes people want to take a stand.

Our senators, as of this writing, are engaged in an endless debate over the impeachment court brouhaha involving the immensely popular Sara Duterte, beleaguered Vice President of the Philippines, whose stint at the Department of Education yielded a budget brawl and endless memes.

On Monday this week, senators led by Senate President Francis “Chiz” Escudero went into a wordplay swordplay over “forthwith” and had their audiences either aghast at the speechifying or abraded by how long it took for them to settle on something that would soothe everyone’s egos. Hours later, they agreed to talk again the next day.

It is the next day, and they are still talking. What are they talking about? Some senators ask too many useless questions, others talk too much. A few never talk at all (you know who you are).

The voices float in the air and you may try to grasp some sense out of the arguments they are presenting, but chances are, it boils down to how loudly and emphatically they state their cases that would matter to the public anyway.

“Bizarre,” indeed, is the word to describe what has been happening to our government. It’s unbelievable how our most honorable senators are making themselves look dishonorable with these maneuverings they are enacting on our very screens.

How obnoxious they are in their missions, and how disappointing to the Filipinos who remember how the Senate was peopled by learned leaders who knew what they were there for and who their real bosses were.

Because, frankly speaking, the few people in both houses of Congress with intelligence enough to muster a great deception of a nation have found the perfect foil in those who have no clue what these will all mean for us in the long run.

Meanwhile, we have a 165,000 classroom deficit five days before classes begin, a major traffic management plan yet to be finalized pre-EDSA Rebuild, and rains to remind us anew of a flood control plan yet to be perfected.