Slim pickings
Like dislodged clumps of arterial plaque, President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo’s son and brother-in-law, drifting along the currents of politics, have lodged themselves in the chairmanships of two significant committees. Where they’ve lodged, they’re now poised to act, as arterial plaque does in terms of the circulation of blood, as a means of restricting the flow of legislation concerning natural resources and energy.Is having the President’s son and brother-in-law in such prominent, gate-keeping positions in the House of Representatives the sort of signal she wants to send? As she proclaims herself in “legacy” mode, does she view her legacy as a kind of hardening of the political arteries? In a word, is this, in the phrase immortalized by the President in her recent State of the Nation Address, the “good kind of cholesterol”?
When Mikey Arroyo was given the chairmanship of the House committee on energy, Rep. Eduardo Zialcita of Parañaque City stared down criticism by citing the young Arroyo’s master’s degree in business from the University of California at Berkeley. Zialcita also said, “There are those who say that he’s not qualified, but one doesn’t have to be an expert in the power industry to know the issue confronting the sector. As chair of the committee one only has to listen and build a consensus on which solutions to adopt.”
But, of course, he could simply have told the truth (which is not to say he lied, in terms of defending the younger Arroyo; rather, it was a Churchillian “terminological inexactitude”). The ultimate arbiter of fitness for any committee chairmanship is party affiliation; second to that is perceived usefulness either to the House leadership, or the national leadership, specifically whoever happens to be president of the Philippines at the time. Expertise in the committee’s scope of legislation comes an expendable third in the House’s hierarchy of values.
The younger Arroyo’s chairmanship and the older Arroyo’s designation as chair of the committee on natural resources make perfect sense then in terms of pragmatic politics. The President proclaimed her administration as having a keen interest in energy and mining; her much-ballyhooed Cabinet revamp ended up a reshuffle, with two officials moving sideways -- Angelo Reyes from the Department of Environment and Natural Resources to the Department of Energy, and Lakas-CMD party stalwart Heherson Alvarez named mining czar -- and a Cabinet portfolio serving as political reward to Lito Atienza, who closed a park and reaped stewardship of the environment as the President’s thanks.
If the President’s vision, then, is limited to political recycling, then it shouldn’t be surprising that that chamber of Congress, which is always eager to take its cue from the executive, would demonstrate an equivalent narrowness of vision. That the talent and gene pools are so obviously limited is neither here nor there for the powers-that-be. It’s not what you know, after all, that matters, but rather whom you know. And who knows the President best than her son and brother-in-law?
When the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin famously sneered, “How many divisions has the Pope?” he might as well have been a Filipino congressman. To be sure, there is opposition to the designation of the two Arroyos. But how many votes do they have? The environmentalists and consumers who have questioned the Reyes, Alvarez and Atienza appointments may make noise, but it has to be asked whether such noises can affect the shrewd political calculations the President constantly makes. The party-list representatives questioning the House’s decision, too, represent the wrong constituency.
There is no mining vote and no environmentalist vote, no constituency locally. But there are interests that are comfortable with dealing with the House and national leadership on these issues. They, too, would see the obvious political benefits in having the President’s family serve as gatekeepers in the House, for legislation required to achieve the President’s priorities.
In H.L. Mencken’s view, “Democracy is the theory that holds that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.” The citizenry is certainly getting it good and hard, courtesy of the House of Representatives.
