Should the Senate and the House of Representatives investigate the alleged P10-billion pork barrel scam? The new Senate majority leader, Alan Peter Cayetano, suggests that the public look elsewhere. Because the allegations implicate at least five senators and 23 congressmen, any legislative inquiry would turn emotional, Cayetano said.
Such an investigation could be a problem, he said, since “we’re dealing with our own members.” He outlined a possible scenario: “What if we run out of time and senators and congressmen fight among themselves? We might not pass any piece of legislation.”
We understand what he means, and have previously noted the web of association and implication that seems to have been part of the very design of the alleged scam. The more legislators become involved in the creation of fraudulent organizations or fraudulent projects to channel pork barrel funds, the harder it is to draw a line between who will be investigated and who will do the investigating.
In the House of Representatives, the new minority leader, Ronaldo Zamora, has sought a congressional inquiry into the scandal, but met resistance from the leadership. To quote the astounding rationalization offered by Marikina Rep. Miro Quimbo, chair of the ways and means committee: “Congress does not have a good record in terms of investigating itself, and it’s natural. I think the Speaker [Feliciano Belmonte] is cognizant that even if we come up with the most truthful, exhaustive investigation, it will always be perceived by the public that we could not investigate ourselves because we are covering for one another.”
That assumes, rather remarkably, that the findings will be benign.
But let’s get real. Closer examination tells us that the excuses we have heard from the leadership of both the Senate and the House don’t wash. In the first place, each chamber of Congress has the duty to investigate alleged wrongdoing committed by its own members—that is why they have their respective ethics committees.
Let us assume, for the moment, that Quimbo is right, that Congress does not have a good record in investigating itself. Does that turn duty into mere suggestion? The House might as well abolish its ethics committee.
How about Cayetano’s unspoken assumption, that the sheer number of senators (and congressmen) implicated will make infighting inevitable, and lead to the failure to pass legislation of any kind? That is a possibility, but we think a remote one. The Senate acting as impeachment court has weathered intense pressure, in 2001 and in 2012. But in neither case could the Senate be said to have failed in its primary responsibility.
Both chambers also, and famously, have the responsibility to conduct investigations in aid of legislation. Since the root of the current controversy is the scandal of the pork barrel itself—how by law billions of pesos are allocated for development assistance more or less loosely defined, how the alleged scheme conducted by businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles is based on an intricate, indeed intimate, knowledge of the laws and their loopholes—the so-called “pork barrel scam” is the perfect subject for investigation to consider new legislation.
Many of the possible remedies against pork barrel abuse, or indeed its elimination altogether, depend on new laws being passed. Is there a better reason to convene, say, the Senate blue ribbon committee?
Not least, the Senate and the House have not hesitated to use their investigative powers—and thus the power of publicity their inquiries attract—to intervene in some of history’s most controversial issues. Why turn gun-shy all of a sudden?
It seems to us that it is the prospect of airing dirty linen in public, and lots of it, that unsettles the leadership of both the House and the Senate. Or, rather, and to be more precise, it is what happens after the airing of dirty linen, that weakens the reformist impulse of the new majority.
Cayetano suggests that a televised investigation conducted by the Department of Justice would be best. That would have its uses—but it still won’t get both chambers off the hook.
They have a duty to render an account of themselves, and let the heavens fall.