CHICKENPIE.The Senate is where laws are made. It's also, apparently, where laws go to be shot at.
May 13. National Bureau of Investigation agents entered the GSIS Building to arrest Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa. The ICC had issued a warrant. Crimes against humanity. Nine thousand deaths. The usual. Dela Rosa, who spent years as the public face of the drug war, decided the Senate was a better jurisdiction than The Hague.
The Senate’s own security guards agreed. They fired warning shots. At the NBI. Inside the building. Inside the Philippine Senate.
Let that land for a second.
The institution that exists to write the laws of this republic deployed its security force against the national police to protect one of its own from international law. The Senate protected dela Rosa the way the Senate always protects its own: aggressively, loudly, and without apparent irony.
He got away. This was described as a “standoff.”
Then things got worse.
By June 3, twelve senators had decided the current leadership was the problem. They called an emergency session, declared all Senate positions vacant, and installed Sherwin Gatchalian as acting president. Alan Peter Cayetano, the Senate’s actual president, called it an unconstitutional coup. He wasn’t wrong. Senate rules require 13 votes to elect a Senate president. Twelve senators cannot do it. The senators who passed math class could count.
The Philippine Senate: where twelve is a majority, until it isn’t, until it is again.
Three weeks later, Gatchalian was elected properly. Thirteen senators this time. And with the chamber finally stable, they voted on something of historic national importance: Waling-waling as the national orchid.
It is the law. That’s the punchline.
The law is the thing that happened at the Senate on May 13. The law is what twelve senators declared, and then thirteen. The law is what dela Rosa said when he called the NBI’s warrant an overreach. The law is what you call whatever you’re doing when you have enough power to say so.
The orchid is national now. The senators voted. Thirteen of them this time. They can count when it counts.
