A Senate whose presidency is defined by the personal preferences of whoever holds it cannot legislate freely, investigate honestly, or judge impartially.
The Senate presidency was never designed as a personal office. From Roman leader of the senate – with Cicero being the last to bear that title – to Lord Speaker of Westminster to president of the US Senate pro tempore, the presiding officer of the upper house has been known as the institution’s chief servant – not its self-appointed master.
When the Jones Act of 1916 created the Philippine Senate, its first Senate president – and longest-serving – Manuel L. Quezon, described the chamber as the seat of “calm, mature and prudent public judgment.” Like first among equals of parliament, the president of the Senate is expected to lead the collective body to express the common voice of the republic – not to subject it to personal control. It is against that long-standing political tradition that what is happening these days in the presidency of the Philippine Senate must be measured.
There is a certain kind of political assertiveness in claiming to protect an institution while subordinating it to one’s own life. Since Cayetano’s Senate leadership installed on May 11, 2026, his conduct has reflected exactly this – consistently exercising the dignity and independence of the Senate while deploying the office to serve specific legislative, electoral and political interests.
What we are witnessing is not just a leadership conflict in the usual sense. It looks like the privatization of the Senate presidency — the removal of the office itself by allowing the host to define how the office is created, used, and usurped — driven by a determination to hold on regardless of cost and encouraged by the political machinery programmed to support it.
Signs are hard not to recognize. Appearance of Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa – the fugitive from the ICC warrant – in the Senate to get the only vote to suspend the new president of the Senate was an activity visible to everyone: a legal risk was exchanged for political use, and a sign of what kind of leadership was to come. What happened next only confirmed it. Instead of leading from the top, the new Senate president took to multiple Facebook Live sessions to wage his battle for public opinion outside the chamber, mobilizing support outside its walls.
Senator Imee Marcos’ May 25 video presentation appears to have been an attempt to discredit the then-minority camp by falsely associating them with the unpopular cause of constitutional change – a move apparently designed not to inform and expose evil, but to eliminate Cayetano’s opponents and consolidate the majority Senate leadership. That it was eventually removed from the Senate record after an outcry from his colleagues only underscored how overtly political the gambit was.
And the June 4 blue ribbon committee hearing, proceeding without a Senate secretary or scribes and later denounced as a “false hearing,” delved into allegations and coordinated messages aimed at critics of Duterte, the ICC, and the media. These are not institutional stewardship tools. It is the leadership behavior that has confused his office with the politics that serves it.
The question Filipinos should be asking is not whether Cayetano’s leadership can hold, but why it seems determined to do so. The Senate presidency, as it is currently used, seems to be something it was not designed to be: a command post to oversee legal and political disclosures. Control of the party leadership means control of its agenda, its committees, its investigative priorities, and – most importantly – the conduct and process of the impeachment trial of the Vice President.
For a group of senators whose general legal weakness is well documented, and whose electoral future in 2028 depends on the right political connections, the Senate presidency is not just a prestigious office. It tends to act as a shield, a lever, and an insurance policy rolled into one. Hiding behind “institutional independence” while the Senate seems to be used to protect allies from ICC and corruption cases is not selfish. It’s his puppet.
What seems to give Cayetano’s leadership its credibility — and what makes holding office more difficult to remove — is the support of Duterte’s camp and his mobilization efforts among his base. This is not just an internal matter for the Senate. Duterte’s political network, still formidable despite the former president’s detention in The Hague, provides an external base of support that insulates the current leadership from the usual pressures of institutional accountability. But the closest enablers are the senators themselves – the political elite who, by lending their votes and their silence, make this bold personalization of the Senate presidency possible.
History is instructive here: modern rulers have rarely seized power alone. They have almost always been carried into inclusive governance and worked with calculating elites – parliamentarians, party officials, political allies, and other prominent actors – who claimed that loyalty to a dictator was the best political response to the uncertainty of institutional freedom. Senators behind the Cayetano camp seem to be playing a version of the same bet today. This does not happen in a vacuum. It is seen as the visible face of deep solidarity between the leadership of the Senate and a political system whose main interest is not the integrity of the council but its protection.
Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero intervened on 3 June – incorporating a new majority camp and facilitating the creation of a new leadership – broke this deadlock, at least temporarily. As a former president of the Senate himself, he understood from his experience what the office demands and what can be lost when it is reduced to a tool for personal life and self-aggrandizement. He knew exactly what was at stake, and what it would cost the institution if left unchecked. Whether the new deal sticks, and whether it will provide the kind of Senate the country really needs, remains to be seen.
The warning, however, is clear. When the Senate presidency is privatized to this extent — when it is inseparable from the survival of those who hold it, based on an external political system, and defended through boycotts, Facebook Lives, and fraud lawsuits rather than through the legitimate exercise of legislative power — the institution itself is undermined in ways that defeat any leadership.
An office ceases to be a seat of reasoned authority and instead becomes a gift to be held and protected in any way its occupant sees fit. A Senate whose presidency is defined by the personal preferences of whoever holds it cannot legislate freely, investigate honestly, or judge impartially. It can serve itself – and in doing so, it betrays everyone else.
The leadership dispute will soon be resolved, as all such disputes eventually are. But the cost of that result, which is not borne by those who fought for that position but by the institution and the public it is intended to serve, will not be easily reversed. – Rappler.com
Arjan Aguirre is an Assistant Professor (currently on academic leave) in the Department of Political Science, Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently completing his PhD in Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, USA.
