Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano on Tuesday tied the suspension of plenary sessions to a broader fight over who controls the chamber’s committees, framing the standoff as a defense of what he called the rightful majority bloc.
Speaking again through a Facebook Live broadcast, Cayetano laid out his reasoning for keeping the Senate from convening for two straight days starting Monday. He cast the dispute as fundamentally about committee control, arguing that the opposing camp intended to strip those assignments away from the leadership currently in power.
“Their plan was to eventually remove the committees from the legitimate majority. I say ‘legitimate majority’ because, in a fully independent Senate, 13 is 13,” he said in Filipino. He pressed the point further on the nature of democratic numbers: “Even if someone is abroad, a fugitive, or in detention, in a democracy you cannot say, ‘I love democracy,’ and then, when you are in the minority, expect your will to prevail.”
By Cayetano’s account, the minority’s decision to walk out the previous week—triggered by a proposal allowing senators to join proceedings online—was itself a maneuver aimed at wresting control back from his leadership. He said the majority is now responding in kind, treating the senators’ continued absence as grounds to push back against what he characterized as a “puppet Senate.”
Cayetano also presented the session freeze as a deliberate procedural step meant to protect a specific deadline: the Senate Blue Ribbon Committee’s scheduled Thursday inquiry into the flood control scandal.
“Let me repeat: they used the parliamentary tool of a walkout to prevent the change of the rules from pushing through,” he said in Filipino. He added that the majority was now invoking the rules “properly—morally and legally—to ensure that the committees are not taken away, so that the Blue Ribbon hearing on Thursday and other important hearings in various committees can proceed.”
