The butterflies came home to the same family compound

Watch the roll call from Monday again, not for the drama but for the surnames.

Cayetano, Alan Peter. Cayetano, Pia. Villar, Mark. Villar, Camille. Marcos, Imee. Estrada, Jinggoy. Six of the thirteen votes that installed a new Senate president came from three families. Add the senator whose half-brother abstained on the same floor, the senator whose father was a president, the senator who is the president’s sister, and the picture clarifies. The Senate did not just change leaders on May 11. It rearranged the furniture inside the same living room.

This is what the Filipino political class calls “butterfly politics” — balimbing, when it is unkind, “fluid alliances” when it is feeling generous. Loren Legarda, elected as part of Sotto’s bloc, crossed over without warning to vote for Cayetano. Sotto himself called it her “true colors.” He would know. He has lived through, by his own admission, eight Senate leadership changes. The Senate flipped from 13 to 11 to 13 to 11 in the Pimentel years. It flipped again under Escudero in September 2024. It flipped Monday. Loyalty, friendship, the word given, Sotto said, sometimes is of no moment.

The wings flutter. The compound stays.

And here is what should make every reader pause: Sen. Risa Hontiveros’ Anti-Political Dynasty Bill — Senate Bill 1901 — cleared the electoral reforms committee on Feb. 24, signed by twelve senators, sponsored on the floor that same afternoon, waiting for a plenary vote. The compromise version covers only the second degree of consanguinity. Hontiveros herself called it a first step. Her own study cited in the committee report estimated the bill could affect roughly 30 percent of existing dynasties starting in 2028.

Now her committee chairmanship has been declared vacant along with everyone else’s. The bill does not die in a vote but in a calendar.

The 1987 Constitution, in Article II Section 26, said the State shall prohibit political dynasties “as may be defined by law.” Thirty-nine years later, the law remains undefined — not because the country could not agree on a definition, but because the chamber asked to write it is composed, in disproportionate share, of the families it would regulate. Asking the Senate to pass an anti-dynasty law is like asking the Iloilo public market vendors’ association to vote itself out of its own stalls. They might do it. They have not, in four decades, shown any sign of wanting to.

A counterargument deserves a hearing. Dynasties, the defenders say, deliver name recognition that lets continuity policy survive election cycles. There is something to it. Some political families have governed competently for generations. But continuity is not the same as accountability, and competence is not the same as legitimacy. When a single family controls the agriculture sector, the budget, and the impeachment vote — across the Senate, the House and the local executive — the question stops being whether they govern well. It becomes whether anyone outside the family can govern at all.

Here is a realistic ask, not a sweeping one. Schedule SB 1901 for plenary the moment committees reorganize on May 18. Make Pangilinan or whoever inherits the agriculture committee resume the farmers’ hearing the same week. Publish, in plain Filipino and English, the family relationships of every senator and representative on the chamber’s official site. None of this requires a constitutional amendment. All of it requires a Senate that is willing to look at itself.

The farmers who paid for bus tickets to be heard last Monday will pay again the next time. They always do. The butterflies will keep landing. The only question is whether the rest of us will keep pretending the landscape is changing.