Qwertyman for Monday, July 28, 2025

RETURNING SENATORS Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan have been getting roasted online for joining the majority bloc in the incoming Senate, thereby securing important committee chairmanships under the highly unpopular but tough-to-unseat Senate President Chiz Escudero. Despite sympathetic reactions from such opposition stalwarts as former VP and now Naga Mayor Leni Robredo and Sen. Risa Hontiveros, the two have been roundly scored for their decision.

Typical of the outcry was this much circulated post by a friend I deeply admire, the penal and judicial reformer Raymund Narag, who lamented that “They will join the majority. The same majority that excuses corruption as politics, power as protection, and self-interest as national interest. But what they forget is that we voted for them not to play the game. They forget that it was not just about committees, or positions, or so-called influence. It was about principle. We mourn the death of idealism in Philippine politics. But it’s a slow death. Not by assassination, not by defeat, but by compromise. And the executioners are the very people who once called themselves idealists.”

It’s a heavy to charge to lay at the feet of these two men—turncoatism, betrayal, the surrender of idealism, latent hypocrisy—and I can see where the disappointment and dismay are coming from. But with all due respect to my friend Raymund and to those who share his sentiments, I don’t see these dire reversals at all in the choices that Bam and Kiko made, but possibly an interesting and potentially significant maturing of our political culture, especially within the opposition.

It’s true that the Bam-Kiko decision came as a surprise, and that things would have been much clearer, the battle lines much more cleanly drawn, had they sat with Sen. Risa Hontiveros in a true and unflinching albeit tiny minority, duking it out with the majority at every turn, exposing wrongdoing right and left, and remaining unblemished by compromise to the end of their term. We could have remembered them for their impassioned speeches in defense of democracy and justice, tilting against the windmills of the Marcos-Duterte regime.

But I don’t think that’s all or what we elected these two senators for—or was it? As far as I can tell, we voted for them to get things done—the good, the right, and the best things—where they mattered, in their areas of expertise: Bam in education, and Kiko in agriculture. Granted, it may have been secondary to sending a message upstairs that these were the good guys, infinitely much better than the trapos being foisted on us by both the Marcos and Duterte factions, but it was their track record that gilded their credentials.

In case we’ve forgotten or weren’t listening too closely when they were campaigning, Bam Aquino authored 51 laws, including the Universal Access to Quality Tertiary Education Act, the Go Negosyo Act, and the Microfinance NGOs Act. He was also behind the Masustansyang Pagkain para sa Batang Pilipino Act and the No Shortchanging Act of 2016. Kiko Pangilinan, an even more seasoned lawmaker, produced over 150 laws, including the Sagip Saka Act, the Coconut Farmers and Industry Trust Fund Act, and the 105-Day Expanded Maternity Leave Law.

Their acceptance of the agriculture and education chairmanships should help ensure and strengthen their ability to pursue these progressive initiatives further—regardless of how they think about and vote on other issues of national consequence, such as the impeachment of VP Sara Duterte, the national budget, our foreign policy, and constitutional change. 

We have yet to see—as their critics already seem to have foretold—if they will cherish their chairmanships to the extent of abandoning their fundamental principles. Instead I foresee the greater likelihood of the reverse happening: of Bam and Kiko relinquishing their posts should their stay there prove morally untenable. If they were to perform well in their Senate positions, and they were then stripped of their chairmanships for their independent stances, then that still would be more emphatic than if they had never assumed the responsibilities that are also their entitlements, according to their competencies.

But in and of itself, joining the majority bloc—never a firm nor a politically or philosophically cohesive entity in our system of what Shakespeare called “vagabond flags”—should be less of a deal or an issue than it is being made out to be. This “majority,” in any case, seems such a ragtag band that it is almost certain to collapse before the end of the present term.

It probably says more about us as an electorate than about Bam and Kiko when we cast their decision as a “betrayal” of what they were presumably voted for. I’m no political scientist so the experts can explain this better than I can, but it seems to me that we’ve become used to seeing our legislature as a forced marriage of fundamentally incompatible forces—the ruling party (powerful but unintelligent, corrupt, opportunist, cynical, good-for-nothing) and the opposition (weak but progressive, smart, morally upright, idealistic, courageous, media-savvy, and effective). We see the Senate as an arena, a battleground (and often a circus), rather than an office where people are supposed to work, and work together (never mind that some of them are lazy and stupid), achieving results through compromise.

Bam and Kiko just need to prove themselves once more at their jobs and serve the Filipino to the best of their ability, so that when 2028 comes—and whatever their plans may be for that next milestone—they can have a good answer to the basic question that our voters have every right to ask: “So what have you done for me?” It’s a question that the elevated rhetoric of the progressive opposition has sadly often ignored and dearly paid for, almost as if it were beneath consideration. Bam and Kiko need a platform from which to connect corruption to the price of rice, to persistent flooding, to the failure of Filipino children to read at Grade 3. 

Of course, it can be said that that’s exactly what Risa Hontiveros has been doing all by her lonesome—without the benefit of patronage, and with just the chairmanship of the Senate Committee on Women, Children, Family Relations and Gender Equality to her name. She sponsored the passage of the Expanded Solo Parents Welfare Act, the Safe Spaces Act which protects Filipinos, especially women, from gender-based harassment in public spaces, and the Anti-Online Sexual Abuse or Exploitation of Children Law.

Taking another tack but manifesting the same tenacity, Sen. Loren Legarda has survived through many administrations in all kinds of political weather, drawing criticism for that ability, but has remained steadfast in her commitment to protecting the environment, mitigating climate change, and promoting Philippine arts and culture like no other senator nor President for that matter has. 

But for what they’ve already done and could yet do, I think Bam and Kiko deserve our trust. Let’s cut them some slack and give them a chance. We pinklawans aren’t the only voters they’re answerable to.

(Photo from rappler.com)