When Vice President Sara Duterte entered the Nograles Hall of the Batasang Pambansa on August 27, some might say she was more prepared to go on the offensive and defend herself, rather than her office’s proposed budget.
Five sentences into her opening statement, she was already lamenting the possible death of her legacy projects — a permanent office, an agency charter, and a museum — due to the current “political climate.” She also addressed criticisms regarding her silence on the West Philippine Sea dispute, her spat with the police over the removal of her security detail, and, in broad strokes, her confidential expenses.
Towards the end of her speech, and before a lengthy presentation on salient points of her budget request, she also accused lawmakers — to their face — of plotting her impeachment, and claimed she had recorded conversations to prove it.
Anyone watching that hearing, from the journalists covering physically to the spectators tuned in to the livestream, knew it was bound to get ugly. It was only a matter of how exactly.
It was a different kind of chaos, one that was still unexpected for a chamber that has been witness to shouting matches and near fistfights over the years.
No free pass
For her first two years in the Office of the Vice President (OVP), Duterte enjoyed parliamentary courtesy in the House, a time-honored tradition that allowed her agency to breeze through committee-level budget deliberations with no questions asked.
But ahead of this year’s budget briefing for her office, there had been signs that she was not going to walk away from the hearing unscathed.
On August 13, the appropriations panel approved a motion, introduced by the often ostracized Makabayan bloc, compelling the Commission on Audit (COA) to hand over to the House copies of its audit reports on the OVP’s confidential funds in 2022 and 2023. The leftist lawmakers had been requesting those documents for the longest time; that colleagues in the majority joined them in their request was no ordinary feat.
Rappler talked to at least five lawmakers from various political parties in the House, all of whom denied that the leadership in the lower chamber made specific instructions, or had a coordinated strategy, on how to handle the OVP hearing.
“We have 300-plus members here in Congress. Of course, the Speaker cannot control everyone. Nobody can prevent me from speaking in that committee,” Santa Rosa, Laguna Representative Dan Fernandez, one of the lawmakers who spoke during the OVP budget deliberations, told Rappler.
After the COA sent the House the subpoenaed audit reports, copies eventually circulated among lawmakers ahead of the deliberations, giving them ample time to review the documents that would serve as basis for their individual interpellations.
“We have been informed that the documents have arrived. So even prior to the scheduled hearing of the Vice President, we asked for a copy,” Manila 3rd District Representative Joel Chua, also among Duterte’s interpellators, said in a Rappler Talk interview, adding he was able to review the documents a day or two before the August 27 proceedings.
Other lawmakers also showed indications that they were able to thoroughly examine the documents ahead of time. Deputy Majority Leader Mikaela Suansing, on the day of the deliberations, had numerous slides prepared, complete with graphs, comparing the confidential expenses of the OVP from the last quarter of 2022 to the third quarter of 2023, based on state auditors’ findings. Batangas 2nd District Representative Gerville Luistro had a speech ready, rebutting every argument that Duterte raised in her letter to COA that opposed the House subpoena on the audit reports on her confidential funds.
Emboldened to ask questions
In a chamber dominated by a supermajority alliance which towers a minuscule opposition, rogue lawmakers are rare these days.
In September 2022, during the honeymoon stage of the new administration, deliberations on the OVP’s proposed 2023 budget took only less than 10 minutes before it hurdled the appropriations panel. Duterte, who was the running mate of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. in the 2022 elections that they had won by a landslide, received a warm welcome from the House, with Speaker Martin Romualdez even personally gracing the hearing to offer his support.
No one tried to ask the Vice President a question back then, except for the Makabayan lawmakers, who were eventually persuaded by the House minority bloc to save their questions for the plenary.
It was more or less the same scenario in August 2023. No less than the President’s son, House Senior Deputy Majority Leader Sandro Marcos, moved to end the deliberations on the OVP’s proposed 2024 budget immediately, despite objections only from the leftist bloc.
This year, more than a dozen lawmakers signed up to ask Duterte questions. Only three of them are from the Makabayan bloc; the rest are from either other members of the House minority, or the House supermajority. There was also no Sandro Marcos present to call for the immediate termination of the budget briefing.
Religious followers of the developments in the lower chamber were not shocked by this turn of events. House members, after all, are now more at ease criticizing Duterte in press briefings sanctioned by the House leadership, and their anti-Duterte remarks frequently find their way into press releases distributed through the chamber’s official channels.
A mega panel has also been investigating extrajudicial killings and offshore gambling, which were among the top controversies surrounding the previous administration led by Sara’s father, former president Rodrigo Duterte.
On top of these, Duterte has resigned from the Marcos Cabinet, a confirmation that the 2022 alliance they built has come to an end.
This pivot by the House did not happen overnight, and was partly the result of the long-simmering tensions between Romualdez and Sara Duterte, who had been taking a swipe at a supposedly ambitious politician whom she described as “tambaloslos.” Pro-Duterte vloggers later used the Visayan pejorative to refer to the House Speaker.
In their rift last year, Romualdez did not publicly fight back, letting his majority leader, Zamboanga City 2nd District Representative Mannix Dalipe, do the talking. Political parties eventually declared their support for the Speaker’s leadership amid unverified rumors of an ouster plot. Congressional insiders know that Romualdez’s leadership style revolves around nurturing close ties and finding common ground with party leaders, whose role is to cascade information to the rest of the lawmakers.
The point is: Duterte getting a free pass in previous years was the result of lawmakers toeing the party line. Logic dictates that the confidence of House members to throw questions at her this year is also because of that same party line.
One lawmaker speaking on condition of anonymity insisted there was no coordinated House effort to pounce on Duterte over issues surrounding her confidential funds. But was there any formal discussion at all prior to the August 27 OVP briefing?
“We just talked about not losing our cool, because we know that’s what she wanted,” the congressman told Rappler.
Secret funds in the spotlight
Whether or not Duterte would physically face the committee on August 27 was up in the air even at the last minute. The initial budget briefing schedule sent by the House to reporters weeks prior listed OVP chief of staff Zuleika Lopez as the agency’s representative.
“[We] were surprised to see her come. There were some lawmakers who thought she wouldn’t show up,” another House member told Rappler in confidence.
And the Vice President did come. A combative Duterte did many things that day — interrupt the presiding officer, try to have that presiding officer replaced, accuse leftist lawmakers of having communist ties, question House rules — except answer the burning questions about her past confidential expenses.
Lawmakers zeroed in on the audit reports, and pointed out that COA had asked Duterte to return P73 million of the confidential funds she had in 2022. State auditors could not understand how millions in pesos that were spent as rewards related to medicines, various goods, and other payments, had anything to do with information gathering and surveillance.
Duterte did not appreciate the line of questioning. She said the issue is now with the Supreme Court. She asserted that the topic should be limited to her proposed budget of P2.037 billion for 2025, as well as her budget utilization for the current year, both of which did not have a line item on confidential expenses.
Appropriations committee senior vice chairperson Stella Quimbo, the presiding officer whom Duterte wanted to fire, did not cave in, pointing out that the Vice President had been informed beforehand that the scope of discussions would include the OVP’s budget utilization rate covering a five-year period up to the previous year.
Rappler has it on good authority from a source that the House also sent similar letters to Duterte in 2022 and 2023 — years when she was accorded parliamentary courtesy.
Critics don’t buy Duterte’s argument on why the House should not dwell on confidential expenses from previous years, insisting that at the end of the day, it’s an issue of accountability and transparency.
“How you used the previous year’s budget will say a lot on how you would utilize your budget for the succeeding year. You don’t want to be abetting potential corruption in the 2025 budget, so we need to examine it,” House Assistant Minority Leader Arlene Brosas told Rappler.
“It is her duty to explain how her office utilized public funds as much as it is the duty of Congress, on behalf of the people, to scrutinize the proposed budgets and the outcomes of utilizing those budgets in the previous years. It doesn’t matter whether the budget was approved last year, five years ago, or 10 years ago,” independent public budget analyst Zy-za Suzara also told Rappler.
A game of optics
During that hearing, the combative Duterte — accompanied by only one staff member in the room — accused lawmakers of a deliberate effort to malign her and bring her down.
“Nagkakandabuhol-buhol na iyong script (Your script has all been messed up),” Duterte told the committee, a statement Fernandez flagged.
Lawmakers have since accused Duterte of trying to win the court of public opinion, by clinging to an image of a helpless politician being ganged up on by bullies. In one interview, Manila 6th District Representative Bienvenido Abante theorized that the Vice President wanted the House to cite her in contempt and detain her.
House Deputy Majority Leader Jude Acidre, a close ally of the Speaker, believes Duterte “was testing the patience of the committee.”
“I think as members of Congress, we just showed what kind of people we are. We decided to take the higher ground,” he added.
In a text message to Rappler, OVP spokesperson Michael Poa belied accusations that it was Duterte who had a script in mind going into that hearing.
“Sa pagkakakilala ko sa ating Vice President, it is not in her character to be scheming. Totoong tao siya (Based on how I know the Vice President, it is not in her character to be scheming. She is a genuine person),” Poa said.
“As I’ve said in previous interviews, hindi ko maaaring pangunahan ang ating Vice President pagdating sa mga dahilan or reasons behind her decision to defer and leave the approval or disapproval of the OVP budget proposal to the wisdom of Congress. That being said, I am confident that ‘to appear that she is being bullied’ is not one of them,” he added.
(As I’ve said in previous interviews, I cannot preempt the Vice President on the reasons behind her decision to defer and leave the approval or disapproval of the OVP budget proposal to the wisdom of Congress. That being said, I am confident that “appearing to be bullied” is not one of them.)
Ramon Beleno III, a Davao-based political analyst, said he was still surprised by Duterte’s behavior despite her tendency to be stubborn.
“Those scenes in the House were on another level. It’s as if she is sending a message. If you monitor social media here in Mindanao, the narrative here is different, that ‘she slayed them,’” Beleno told Rappler. “She is usually cool and collected except for some rare instances.”
Unparliamentary behavior
Duterte, once upon a time, was a Davao City mayor who made national headlines for punching a court sheriff who refused to delay the demolition of shanties in her hometown. To this day, it’s an image that remains ingrained in the consciousness of the Philippine electorate.
On that day in 2011, some saw a strong woman who stood up to a bully; others witnessed an elected official unafraid to lose her temper, even when cameras were rolling.
In a way, the Vice President brought her confrontational demeanor to Congress, now an institution composed of members who are no longer willing to bow down to her and agree with her wishes, like they did when she helped orchestrate the ouster of a House speaker under a country governed by her father.
“She’s like an entitled brat,” Representative Chua said.
“‘I am the daughter of the former president, so I can do everything that I want.’ That is how she acted,” Representative Brosas added.
Despite its many faults, the House remains a sacred institution, and lawmakers, especially when it suits them, would fight tooth and nail for the respect that the august chamber deserves, and justify the many rules that they observe.
“We always follow proper decorum. We address each other in the third person, to avoid confrontation and direct attack to different members and resource persons,” Representative Fernandez said.
“There’s a certain ceremony, so to speak, when the executive goes to Congress, and presents their budget. We show people that democracy is at work, that the separation of powers is not absolute, that there is a process of checks and balances,” Representative Acidre added.
The fallout from the August 27 spectacle is profound, regardless of whether or not it is part of a “script”.
The appropriations committee has withheld the submission of the OVP’s budget request to the plenary, and its status is now in limbo. Another round of deliberations is scheduled on September 10.
House Assistant Majority Leader Zia Alonto Adiong, who is assigned by the chamber to sponsor the OVP budget, will have a headache doing so in light of Duterte’s non-answers to the most pressing budgetary questions, not just on previous years’ confidential expenses, but even on whether the OVP deserves funding for social services that other agencies are already providing.
Representatives Acidre, Brosas, Chua, and Fernandez have not ruled out the possibility of calling for a reduced 2025 budget for the OVP.
And most strikingly, at least one lawmaker has voluntarily brought up the idea of having her removed from office.
“The misappropriation of confidential funds at a time when we are lacking funds for public services, and her refusal to offer an explanation, are clear bases for impeachment,” House Deputy Minority Leader France Castro said.
This is Duterte’s most important test of survival. Will she pass? – Rappler.com
*Most quotes in Filipino were translated into English, and some were shortened for brevity.