You’ve seen this before

Do Makati Mayor Junjun Binay and Sen. Bong Revilla have the same flacks? The scene last Thursday when Binay was arrested for repeatedly defying the summons of the Senate smacked of déjà vu. You’ve seen this before, you tell yourself—and then you remember: Revilla did the same playbook, only perhaps in much more melodramatic, histrionic form.

There was the support crowd cum prayer brigade come to offer their

patron weepy, strident demonstrations of love. There was the resort to overt prayerfulness and recourse to God—Binay’s handlers making sure to announce to the public that he went to church before his arrest; Revilla being prayed over by a multitude of hands before the TV cameras, his shirt defiantly declaring “The Lord is on my side” on the eve of his incarceration for plunder and other charges related to the pork barrel scam. Children were part of the script, of course—Revilla hugging his crying brood, Binay bringing his kids out in public to underline the sentiment earlier tearfully expressed by his sister, Sen. Nancy Binay, about how they’d fare once their father and sole parent was hauled off to the Senate.

In both, the bid for public sympathy was transparent, even a bit desperate. The melodramatic flourishes were straight out of a spinmeister’s talking-points memo on how to appeal to the sentimental side of the Filipino public, one that had been weaned on treacly, lachrymose telenovelas where the defiant but pious hero suffers

greatly but his tormentors get their comeuppance in the end. Which was what Binay essentially promised when, after he was released, he vowed to get back at his tormentors in the Senate by taking them to the Supreme Court for the alleged persecution of his person.

But before that, it just had to be said, and even displayed to the cameras, that he suffered a bruise—the tiniest contusion, but there it is, and heaven forbid it should happen to the mayor of Makati—when he was bodily taken to the senators after digging in his heels at the office of the Senate sergeant-at-arms. Oh, the indignity. Oh, the physical violation, the infringement on human rights!

The indispensable abogados de campanilla were also there, trying to delay Binay’s appearance at every turn and making sure they earned their keep by parsing every line in the summons and objecting to what they deem the littlest deviation from it that would be to the detriment of their prized client. The biggest Binay boosters came by way of the surprise appearance of two legal heavyweights, former senators Joker Arroyo and Rene Saguisag, who both objected to what they said was the inquisitorial direction of the Senate committee and how it has now become a form of “martial law.” Arroyo even compared Binay to—good lord—the late Ninoy Aquino.

Has the Senate overreached? Perhaps. It’s high time the blue ribbon subcommittee issued a report on what it has found out so far from the hearings it has conducted. The hearings, it must be remembered, took off from the issue of the reportedly vastly overpriced parking building in Makati City, built under the aegis of the Binays. But, egged on principally by Sen. Antonio Trillanes, the investigation has cast its net much wider, and has uncovered other possible irregularities, such as the inflated purchase of supplies for the Makati hospital; the Binays’ alleged ownership of a string of condominium units acquired through shadowy transactions at City Hall; and, most sensational of all, the sprawling estate in Batangas that former Makati vice mayor Ernesto Mercado says is a prime Binay property in all but name.

Let’s face it: Who or which body at this time has the power to compel the Binay family—the father is the Vice President, two daughters are in Congress, the son is the mayor of the country’s richest city—to answer questions, at the very least, about the sudden enormous leap of their wealth? Asking those questions and getting satisfactory answers are critical, if only for one thing: The paterfamilias is angling to become the next president of the Philippines, and for many years has unabashedly used his powerful previous position as Makati’s hizzoner to prepare for his dreamed-of rendezvous with political destiny. If the leverage of the Senate is what it would take to extract some answers from the Binays, so be it. But it cannot hold interminable, open-ended hearings. After all the drama, what conclusions can it report now to the Filipino people?