Missing the intellectual Congress

By Herbert Vego

WHAT a pity that most members of our two-chamber Congress no longer show the brilliance and independence of mind that their long-ago predecessors had shown.

As a 76-year-old senior citizen, I lament the lack of intellectual debates in the Senate and the House of Representatives today.

The administration of former President Rodrigo Duterte must have struck fear in the hearts of those who did not want to follow the path of then-Sen. Leila de Lima, who spent nearly seven years in detention on trumped-up charges of taking bribe money from drug dealers.

Elected senator in 2016, De Lima — as chair of the Senate Committee on Justice and Human Rights — denounced Duterte for masterminding extrajudicial killings during his term as mayor of Davao City.

In February 2017, she was arrested.

Her fellow senators expressed no objection.

Some of them, having been reelected, are still around and have even turned coat to sing praises to incumbent President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

A Duterte loyalist known for his “subservience to China” lost his reelection bid for senator in 2025.

My guess is that then-Sen. Francis Tolentino lost because he had openly supported Duterte’s “verbal agreement” with Xi Jinping, allowing Chinese fishermen to fish within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone in the West Philippine Sea.

Tolentino said that Duterte could “validly enter into legally binding international verbal agreements with other states for and on behalf of the Philippines.”

But, tough luck, Tolentino is now secretary of the Department of Labor and Employment (DOLE) in the Marcos administration.

Anyway, it’s good to know that we have once again regained a few “courageous voices” in our Senate and House of Representatives, though they are not as impressive as their predecessors in the pre-martial law era.

To reiterate, I am 76 but still remember those years in the 1950s and 1960s when principled senators like Claro Recto, Raul Manglapus, Eva Kalaw, Tecla Ziga, Quintin Paredes, Francisco Rodrigo, Camilo Osias, Ambrosio Padilla, Arturo Tolentino, Estanislao Fernandez, Lorenzo Sumulong, Lorenzo Tañada, Jovito Salonga, Jose Diokno, Gaudencio Antonino, Ninoy Aquino, and Rodolfo Ganzon would engage each other in lively debates, often touching on the president’s decisions.

The Senate of the early 1960s saw anti-graft probes against wheeler-dealers like American businessman Harry Stonehill, a friend of then-President Diosdado Macapagal who had grown a business empire of 18 corporations in our country.

His luck turned sour when he was forced to face a congressional investigation for tax evasion, smuggling, bribery, influence peddling, and economic sabotage.

The Senate bravely named then-President Diosdado Macapagal as Stonehill’s “protector.”

Sensing political repercussions, Macapagal ordered Stonehill’s deportation without trial in 1962.

But that did not prevent Ilonggo Sen. Rodolfo Ganzon from linking Macapagal to Stonehill’s Filipino dummies, who were still amassing money from “blue seal” cigarettes in 1965.

The Stonehill episode hit Macapagal so hard that he lost his reelection bid against then-Sen. Ferdinand Marcos Sr. in November 1965.

In a privilege speech, Sen. Gaudencio Antonino exposed the “tong system,” referring to bribe money given in exchange for a favor.

The “tong” has become the new normal.

Antonino could have easily won reelection had he not perished in a plane crash on the eve of the 1967 senatorial election.

His wife, Magnolia, took over as substitute candidate and won.

Because of the two-party system, politicians in those days ran under either the Nacionalista Party (NP) or the Liberal Party (LP).

The 1987 Constitution, unfortunately, replaced the two-party system with a multiparty framework that encouraged switching party affiliations to align with the sitting administration.