In one fell swoop, Senate President (SP) Chiz Escudero has started to fritter away one of the most powerful weapons of the Legislature, the most effective means by which the Senate and the House exercise both their law-making powers and their prerogative to check the Executive Branch: the subpoena.
The power will always be there: it is in the Fundamental Law, and no SP — no matter how inept or effete such as Escudero is — can ever bargain it away. But as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of the subpoena is in the issuing.
While under the internal rules of the Senate the SP approves and signs any subpoena issued by that Chamber, the tradition is that any Committee Chairman who asks for one, will get it, as the SP always gives the benefit of the doubt to the members of the House that he leads, or what is leadership for?
Thus, the subpoena power of both Houses has always been jealously and zealously guarded.
Even as the Executive has invoked executive privilege (which has led to some very interesting Supreme Court cases such as those of Ermita and Neri), the Senate has always chosen to test the limits of its powers in Court rather than back down in the face of challenges by the Executive, especially if evidently egregious.
But it seems that the piercing on his ear and the frequent trimming of his eyebrows have curdled Escudero’s legal thinking.
First, he threw the question of whether the subpoena should be issued to the Senate’s in-house counsels for them to determine whether there might be a “constitutional crisis,” in effect allowing unelected factota to second-guess senators elected at large by several million voters.
Granting that the opinions of those obscure lawyers are merely recommendatory, it was still a “Pontius Pilate” move, considering that the issuance of a subpoena is personal to the SP and the present one is a lawyer and thus charged with knowledge of the law. Then, during the presser announcing his refusal to issue the subpoena, the SP turned the law on its head by again raising the specter of a constitutional crisis.
In addition, he appallingly said that a resort to the courts should be the remedy for his refusal, in other words practically challenging his colleagues to take him to court. Odd…
If it was his in-house (more like outhouse) lawyers who put him up to that conclusion, then he should take one of his wife’s Hermes bags and bash his lawyers on the head with it. If that was his own opinion, he should take that bag and hit his own head.
His statements are grossly distorted readings of Neri and Ermita. In the factual milieu obtaining in Neri, no constitutional crisis ensued when Secretary Neri was ordered arrested by the Senate. It was Neri, not the Senate, who had to resort to the courts to assail his arrest.
And contrary to his pronouncement that in both cases the Supreme Court had widened the concept of executive privilege, the Court had in fact narrowed the effect of such invocation. In the case of Neri it limited the privilege to just three questions and upheld the power of the Senate to still subpoena Neri.
Escudero may be the first male SP to wear an earring, but his break with tradition is much worse than that: a dilution of the powers of the Legislature that may well require a lot of doing to undo.
He alarmingly seems cavalier about the reputational harm he is doing to the Senate, as if saying “que se joda,” a Spanish colloquialism meaning “screw it!” It may as well have been spelled “queso joda” in the case of Chiz Escudero.
It doesn’t matter: es el Senado el que esta jodido — it’s the Senate that is screwed.