Without a secretariat on hand to take down the proceedings, any flood control hearing run by the camp of Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano carries no standing inside the institution, former Senate President Franklin Drilon argued Thursday.
The legal vacuum, as Drilon described it, traces back to a work-from-home order from acting Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, who shut down official Senate operations for the day and kept resource persons out of the building. With the Senate secretariat absent, Drilon said there was simply no one positioned to enter the session into the official log.
“There is no administrative staff in the Senate today because, from what I saw yesterday, Sen. Gatchalian issued a directive that today is work from home and no one will enter the Senate,” Drilon said in Filipino during a radio interview.
He was careful to note that nothing barred the senators or their witnesses from gathering. The problem, in his reading, is purely procedural: a meeting nobody officially records does not register as Senate business.
“Sen. Cayetano can go, or whoever goes, but without administrative staff, no one will record the events if a hearing happens. So in the records of the Senate, no hearing took place,” Drilon stressed.
To back the point, the veteran lawmaker reached into Senate history. He pointed to an old leadership fight tied to the late Sen. Blas Ople, when his own group declined to acknowledge a turnover and blocked any official transcript of what unfolded. Sessions left undocumented, he said, have never been treated as legally real by the chamber.
“This is also what will happen now if Sen. Pia Cayetano and the 18 witnesses go, no one will record their meeting,” Drilon concluded.
Drilon’s warning landed against the backdrop of a chamber split in two. Sen. Pia Cayetano rejected the legitimacy of the June 3 reshuffle that removed her brother from the Senate presidency, contending the move fell short of the 13-senator quorum she said was required, and went ahead with her own session featuring 18 former Marines who say they took part in large cash deliveries linked to the questioned flood control projects.
That parallel proceeding ran directly counter to the schedule set by the rival camp, where Sen. Erwin Tulfo — named Blue Ribbon chairman under the Gatchalian-aligned majority — had already reset the official public hearing on the flood control anomalies to June 8.
