[OPINION] The slow undoing of the Philippine Senate presidency

The Senate presidency has never been designed as a personal office. From the Roman princeps senatus — with Cicero as the last to bear the title — to Westminster’s Lord Speaker to the American Senate president pro tempore, the presiding officer of the upper chamber has always been known as the institution’s leading servant — not its self-appointed master.

When the Jones Act of 1916 created the Philippine Senate, its first Senate president — and the longest serving one — Manuel L. Quezon, described the chamber as the seat of “the serene, mature and prudent judgment of the public.” As the primus inter pares of the chamber, the Senate president is expected to lead the collective body to articulate the reasonable voice of the republic — not to subordinate it to personal control. It is against that long-held political tradition that what is unfolding these days in the Philippine Senate presidency must be measured.

There is a particular kind of political audacity in claiming to protect an institution while systematically subordinating it to one’s own survival. Since the Cayetano Senate leadership was installed on May 11, 2026, its conduct has precisely mirrored this — constantly invoking the Senate’s dignity and independence at every turn while deploying the office to serve specific legal, electoral, and political interests.

What we are witnessing is not a mere leadership dispute in the ordinary sense. It appears to be the personalization of the Senate presidency — a deinstitutionalization of the office itself by allowing the occupant to define how the office is constituted, used, and dispossessed — driven by a determination to hold on regardless of the cost and emboldened by the political machinery arrayed in support.

The signs are difficult not to notice. The appearance of Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa — a fugitive from an ICC warrant — in the Senate solely to secure the vote to install a new Senate president was a transaction visible to everyone: legal jeopardy exchanged for political utility, and a signal of what kind of leadership was to come. What followed only confirmed it. Rather than leading from the floor, the new Senate president took to numerous Facebook Live sessions to wage his battle for public opinion outside the chamber, rallying support beyond its walls.

Senator Imee Marcos’ May 25 video presentation appears to have been a calculated attempt to vilify the then-minority bloc by falsely linking them to the deeply unpopular cause of charter change — a move that seems designed not to inform and expose a vicious wrongdoing, but to delegitimize Cayetano’s rivals and consolidate the majority’s hold on the Senate leadership. That it was eventually withdrawn from the Senate record after an outcry from colleagues only underscored how transparently political the gambit was.

And the blue ribbon committee hearing of June 4, proceeding without a Senate secretary or stenographers and later denounced as a “bogus hearing,” descended into maleta claims and coordinated messaging targeting Duterte critics, the ICC, and the media. These are not the tools of institutional stewardship. They are the conduct of a leadership that has confused the office it holds with the political cause it serves.

The question Filipinos should be asking is not whether the Cayetano leadership can hold on, but why it appears so determined to do so. The Senate presidency, as it is currently being wielded, seems to have become something it was never designed to be: a command post for managing legal and political exposure. Control over the chamber’s leadership means control over its agenda, its committees, its investigative priorities, and — most consequentially — the conduct and process of the Vice President’s impeachment trial.

For a bloc of senators whose collective legal vulnerabilities are well documented, and whose electoral futures in 2028 depend on the right political alignments, the Senate presidency is not merely a prestigious office. It tends to function as a shield, a lever, and an insurance policy rolled into one. Hiding behind “institutional independence” while the Senate appears to be used to protect allies from ICC and corruption cases is not statesmanship. It is a caricature of it.

What appears to give the Cayetano leadership its confidence — and what makes its grip on the office more difficult to dislodge — is the support of the Duterte bloc and its mobilization efforts among its base. This is not simply an internal Senate matter. The Duterte 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 more proximate enablers are the senators themselves — the political elites who, by lending their votes and their silence, make this bold personalization of the Senate presidency possible.

History is instructive here: modern autocrats have rarely seized power alone. They have almost always been carried into dominance by coopting and working with calculating elites — legislators, party officials, political allies, and other influential actors — who wagered that loyalty to the autocrat was the preferable political response to the uncertainty of institutional independence. The senators behind the Cayetano bloc seem to be playing a version of that same wager today. This does not happen in a vacuum. It appears to be the visible surface of a deeper alignment between the Senate leadership and a political machinery whose primary interest is not the integrity of the chamber but the protection of its own.

Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero’s intervention on June 3 — constituting a new majority bloc and enabling the formation of new leadership — broke this impasse, at least momentarily. As a former Senate president himself, he understood from experience what the office demands and what can be lost when it is reduced to an instrument of personal survival and aggrandizement. He knew exactly what was at stake, and what it would cost the institution if left unchecked. Whether the new arrangement holds, and whether it produces the kind of Senate the country actually needs, remains to be seen.

The warning, however, is clear. When the Senate presidency is personalized to this degree — when it becomes inseparable from the survival of those who hold it, anchored on an external political machinery, and defended through boycotts, Facebook Lives, and sham proceedings rather than through the legitimate exercise of legislative authority — the institution itself is diminished in ways that outlast any single leadership.

The office ceases to be a seat of reasoned authority and becomes instead a prize to be held and defended by any means its occupant sees fit. A Senate whose presidency is defined by the personal imperatives of whoever holds it cannot legislate freely, investigate honestly, or adjudicate impartially. It can only 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 outcome, borne not by those who fought for the office but by the institution and the public it is meant to serve, will not be easily undone. – Rappler.com

Arjan Aguirre is an Assistant Professor (currently on study leave) at 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.