Cayetano’s folly

Cayetano’s folly | Daily Tribune

A parlous, messy gridlock that many, including President Marcos Jr. and the former minority senators, saw as not yet a total catastrophe but it might be if it went on much longer.

The crisis clearly broke last Wednesday after Sen. Chiz Escudero’s clutch appearance that dramatically turned SB-11 into SB-12 to constitute a quorum.

Still, in his usual quacking “can’t accept defeat” way, Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano was still at it. The Senate’s near paralysis, which cost him all moral authority to lead the chamber, left him with nothing but fantasies.

On balance, Cayetano probably believed he could live with fantasies. And to leave no room for doubt, he went out of his way to portray himself, even after his fall, as a hilarious concoction of a white knight of truth and a creepy religious zealot in his politically pointless “online seller persona” Facebook livestreams.

But the façade of moralistic flourishes and extended bouts of performative Christianity only highlighted his questionable self-confidence.

For, as many now strongly believe, his self-confidence was in inverse proportion to his abilities, with many believing he wasn’t as bright as he thought he was with his “boycott” maneuver.

And, as to where he got the notion that he was as brilliant as Sen. Tito Sotto, the instigator of the minority’s game-changing “Hail Mary” walkout, is anybody’s guess.

Without a doubt, Sotto’s pitch-perfect timing and razor-sharp mind not only defanged the former majority’s tyrannical attempt at altering the Senate attendance and voting rules but also eventually set the stage for Cayetano’s fall.

Anyway, that many don’t have high regard for Cayetano’s abilities is the logical conclusion of his disposable Senate leadership, which, when it finally happened, came with a resounding “good riddance!”

Cayetano may have hoped his three weeks in office might not have been that straightforward. He must have wished for a six-month honeymoon. But his term counted as one of the briefest in the Senate’s history.

Even though he initially had the numbers, Cayetano and his shameless AWOL band soon enough realized they couldn’t get it all their own way when the former minority’s numbers stunningly achieved parity with theirs.

The numbers finally not only disfavored and rendered toothless the old majority but they also fatally gutted themselves in the meantime.

It was not only because the criminally-tainted “majority” was correctly a “coalition of the charged” but also because their crude empathy for an arrested and soon-to-be-arrested senators came into full view; eliciting disgust that they were more than willing to use their power to forego the accountabilities of the alleged crooks within their ranks.

Still, Cayetano was probably playing his version of going for broke.

He, as one observer put it, tried to “turn an institutional deadlock into a constitutional crisis if everyone gets sucked in.” He had hoped the House, the Executive, and the Judiciary would join him in the mud pit he created.

But on the crisis’ 11th hour, everyone took stock and stood back, leaving Cayetano and his gaslighting cohorts with nothing but cutesy, ill-informed arguments that completely broke down against the factual judicial and historical receipts.