Loose throw

I first met Rep. Gervil Luistro during a trip to Singapore a few years back. This was right after the 2022 general elections, when the so-called UniTeam was still living up to its name, and former President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo (PGMA) was Senior Deputy Speaker. Luistro was part of PGMA’s entourage; I flew in with her husband, Atty. Jose Miguel Arroyo and was invited to lunch with PGMA and some other members of the House, including Luistro.

I noticed that Gervil was overly solicitous of PGMA, even putting food on her plate when the courses were served. In conversation, she was ingratiating, and aimed to impress when the talk turned to legal matters. I found her competent, if a little shallow. In short, just like her namesake rodent: adorable, albeit slightly mousy.

Fast forward to the present. After a tectonic shift in political alignments, PGMA was stripped of her Senior Deputy Speakership, a move that earned the ire of Vice President Sara Duterte (VPSD), who made the snide remark (directed at Speaker Martin Romualdez) that “in your political ambitions, do not be tambaloslos.” The name stuck, a testament to VPSD’s widespread influencer status.

Gervil then became a very important person, thanks to her willingness to pull out all the stops when it came to destroying people marked for liquidation in the House by the Marcos administration, via his cousin, the Speaker.

Luistro then became — or tried to become — preeminent in many of the committees tasked to wreak havoc on the administration’s enemies. She was very visible during the QuadComm and TriComm hearings, and in the hearings on the claimed extrajudicial killings, standing out in her Filipina dress with exaggeratedly puffed sleeves roomy enough to store two volumes each of the SCRA.

She tried to show off her supposed legal luminosity at every turn; for her troubles, she gained nothing but a lot of comments in the media exposing her lack of depth when it came to the law.

Aside from her repeated discomfiture in the hands of former President Duterte when she was attempting to grill him, one of her more derisible acts was saying that I should be held in contempt of the QuadComm for criticism I made on social media. She forgot the doctrine — ladled out in first year law school — that the Legislature does not have indirect contempt powers, but can only sanction acts committed within its presence, not without.

As I said then, Luistro is the kind that you think is very smart if you are not smart, but you will know is not smart if you are smart.

But then the present dispensation, for sheer lack of available talent, will always put audacity over quality. Thus, the proliferation of the likes of Luistro, Ridon, De Lima and Cendaña: people who have a profusion of arrogance in spite of their ignorance.

As the public is increasingly being made aware of the abuses being perpetrated by the House Justice Committee of their powers to hear the impeachment complaints against VPSD with the end in view of converting a constitutional process into a kangaroo court, Luistro and her ilk, notwithstanding their middling legal abilities, are Marcos Jr.’s best bet — those who can sugarcoat their shortcomings with shameless self-importance. Never fearing to make one loose throw after another.