The abolition of the Senate is gaining support as the chamber is increasingly morphing into a liability rather than an asset to the nation, with several of its members facing allegations of dipping their hands into the national budget.

Senators are trying to broker a truce between two colleagues who have accused each other of stealing public money.

Not a probe. Not a hearing. A truce, as though this were a neighborhood spat rather than the hurling of allegations of fraud involving Taguig’s drainage budget.

This is the Senate working exactly as designed, which is to say, like garbage.

Panfilo Lacson accused Alan Peter Cayetano of making P6.79 billion in ghost and duplicated infrastructure insertions in Taguig’s 2025 budget, and filed the evidence with the Ombudsman.

Cayetano flatly denied this, daring Lacson to point to a single project, then dared him to look into projects in Quezon City and Makati too, as if that would settle anything.

He clapped back that Lacson would drown, not in floodwater, but in the truth, which is the kind of line that sounds tough until you remember that people actually drowned because the Floodgate scandal happened.

And when Cayetano invited him to inspect the Taguig sites himself, Lacson brushed it off with a joke about drowning in floodwater because his swimming was rusty. A joke.

Then the chamber closed ranks, because God forbid the impeachment trial will be interrupted by two senators engaged in a catfight.

Meanwhile, the textbook defense of the second chamber is that the Senate slows down bad laws and adds to the deliberations.

In practice, it added a conference committee, which is where six senators and six congressmen disappear into a room with no cameras and rewrite the national budget with no one’s name attached to the changes.

The flood control insertions that are drowning barangays survived two chambers’ worth of reviews, precisely because bicameralism proves perfect for rinsing off accountability.

Two senators accused each other of fraud and the chamber’s institutional response was to schedule a caucus. The Senate runs on billions of pesos of the people’s money for a body that, this week, used its collective energy to protect two of its own from an investigation instead.

The argument for a one-house Congress only grows stronger as fewer chambers means fewer places to hide a crime.

One house means one budget vote, one set of names, one body the public can actually point at when money disappears into another “insertion.”

While concentrating all legislative power in one chamber invites the argument that it may turn into a rubber stamp of those who hold power, history has proved that it works.

The Philippines had a unicameral Commonwealth legislature with the National Assembly sitting from 1935 to 1941 without turning into a dictatorship.

In April 1940, however, the second National Assembly amended the 1935 Constitution to restore a bicameral legislature, with the new Senate seated starting in 1941.

One of the drafters of the 1987 Constitution, Fr. Joaquin Bernas, said unicameralism allows for simplicity of organization resulting in economy and efficiency, facility in pinpointing responsibility for legislation, avoidance of duplication, and strengthening of the legislature in relation to the executive branch.

With one chamber, voters will know exactly who passed what. It also avoids redundant committee work and hearings, and the need for staff running two parallel chambers on the same legislation.

A unified, undivided Assembly speaking with one voice is harder for a president to divide, pressure, or play against itself than two chambers that can be leaned on separately or pitted against each other.

On paper, a single chamber concentrates legislative will instead of fragmenting it. A legislature that cannot investigate allegations of theft within its own ranks without first convening a peace summit has no business arguing that it needs two houses to do the job that neither seems willing to do.

The suffering and deaths of people due to substandard flood control projects should weigh heavily on the conscience of the senators who mistake shielding colleagues for protecting the institution.