[Rear View] The padlock is Cayetano’s legacy

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano walks around with a padlock. It is less an object than a way of engaging political reality, a philosophy of denial. It’s his default response when democratic processes fail to produce the outcome he desires. When the numbers turn against him, he doesn’t concede. He reaches for the padlock.

In October 2020, when his term-sharing deal with then-Marinduque representative Lord Allan Velasco came due, Cayetano reneged. He held the 2021 national budget hostage and, once it was clear that his patron then president Rodrigo Duterte was displeased with his immaturity and Velasco had the numbers, attempted to prevent his ouster by physically locking down the plenary hall. He was ousted anyway.

The instinct to padlock the inconvenient, it seems, runs in the family. His wife, Taguig Mayor Lani Cayetano, was charged before the Sandiganbayan for preventing members of the City Council from holding regular sessions, shutting down with a padlock the session hall without proper notice or reason. The Cayetanos, apparently, regard democratic deliberation as something to be physically contained when politically inconvenient.

Now the padlock has arrived at the Senate. 

On June 3, a new majority voted to reorganize committees and to elect Senator Sherwin Gatchalian as Senate President Pro Tempore and Acting Senate President. Cayetano was out. This is how democratic institutions are supposed to work: majorities organize, minorities accept the outcome and fight the next battle within the rules. 

Cayetano’s response was to declare the proceedings illegitimate and to undermine the new majority by staging what can only be described as an insurgency in slow motion.

The most brazen manifestation of this insurgency was the sham blue ribbon committee hearing on June 4 convened by Cayetano’s rump faction. 

Eighteen supposed ex-soldiers said to have worked as bodyguards of former representative Zaldy Co were paraded before the cameras, then proceeded to make sweeping accusations against figures critical of the Cayetano-Duterte political alignment. They named, among others, members of the Marcos family, Senator Erwin Tulfo, Senator Tito Sotto, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutors, and assorted opposition figures of receiving luggage filled with cash, the infamous “malitas,” which they personally delivered. The inconsistencies were too glaring and the claims too outlandish to ignore, immediately ridiculed in social media memes and biting commentaries.

This was not an official Senate hearing or an investigation. It was a press conference, a farce of a hearing with witnesses who appear to have been coached making accusations too sweeping and too conveniently targeted to be credible.

Since his removal, Cayetano has issued memos to Senate employees, chided Gatchalian as a fake leader of the chamber but then weakened his own claim by offering a responsibility-sharing deal that was flatly rejected. His designation as Senate President has been removed in the official website, and the House impeachment team and the multi-agency group preparing for the State of the Nation Address are all dealing with Gatchalian.

What Cayetano is doing is unmistakable. He is using the institutional trappings of the Senate, its session hall, its committee names, its procedural vocabulary, to conduct what is essentially a wrecking operation. He is not trying to participate in the Senate. He is trying to make it ungovernable for everyone else, or at least to muddy the waters sufficiently that the public cannot tell the difference between a legitimate proceeding and a political sideshow. With the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte set to convene, the desperation behind his moves becomes more unmistakeable. The actions of Cayetano and his bloc constitute a telling act of institutional sabotage with a single goal: to protect the Dutertes. The padlock, as always, doesn’t need to be literal.

Pathetic is the word for the spectacle of Cayetano staging fake hearings with questionable witnesses and issuing memos that no one follows, in a chamber he no longer controls. He does not elicit pity or sympathy. Whatever his personal grievances and political calculations, the institution he is damaging will continue to stand.

Alan Peter Cayetano has now lost the speakership and the Senate presidency through the same combination of overreach, arrogance, duplicity, and contempt for majority rule. History will not be kind to him, and he continues to give history no reason to judge him otherwise. The padlock is his legacy. – Rappler.com

Joey Salgado is a former journalist, and a government and political communications practitioner. He served as spokesperson for former vice president Jejomar Binay.