Disorder in the House

While congressmen have been quick to pounce on the Supreme Court, they have always been reluctant to move against their own.
by Yvonne T. Chua


IT’S A lawmaking body, after all, so it seems to make sense that the House of Representatives also makes time to run after crooks. At least that’s what it said it was doing when it insisted on impeaching the Supreme Court chief justice for alleged anomalies in the Judicial Development Fund.

But while the House doggedly pursued the impeachment of Chief Justice Hilario Davide Jr., the same cannot be said about how the legislature treats complaints against its wayward members. Of the 83 complaints the PCIJ managed to retrieve from the chamber’s archives division and committee on ethics and privileges, a mere handful were meted punishment. In contrast, 41 percent were dismissed or unacted upon, even though these complaints included allegations of mauling, rape, and murder.

Usually, the reasons the House cites in dismissing or archiving complaints are technical. For example, the committee on ethics and privileges will take on a complaint only if it is an order of the House, an endorsement or referral of the Speaker or the committee on rules, a petition filed by any member, or a sworn complaint. But because not too many citizens are familiar with the internal House rules and procedures, their complaints are often placed on the fast track to nowhere.

That was the fate suffered by a complaint filed in the current Congress by the Mindanao Federation of Small-Scale Miners Association against Surigao del Sur Rep. Prospero Pichay. The association had accused Pichay of backing big miners and opposing the appointment of Heherson Alvarez to the environment department to protect the major players. Unfortunately, the association’s complaint wasn’t made under oath.

Neither was that of Teresita P. Velayo against Nueva Ecija Rep. Julita Villareal. Velayo’s complaint was more personal, since she said her brother’s killer had been taken into custody by Villareal. But since Velayo’s complaint, filed in the 10th Congress, was unsworn, it was dismissed.

THE 1987 Constitution empowers the Senate and the House to each “determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and with the concurrence of two-thirds of all its members, suspend or expel a member. A penalty of suspension, when imposed, shall not exceed 60 days.”

The House itself considers disorderly behavior to be any of the following: a violation of a law; a violation of any rule or regulation of the House relating to the conduct of any individual in the performance of his or her duty as a member of the House; or improper conduct engaged in by a member that may reflect upon the House from the moment he or she takes his or her oath.

But because it has tended to dismiss or archive complaints, the House has just a few cases to use as basis for determining what constitutes “disorderly behavior” among its members.

One of these occurred more than four decades ago. In 1960, Rep. Sergio Osmeña Jr. was suspended for 15 months for “most serious disorderly behavior in the history of the representative government in the Philippines.” Osmeña’s offense, in fact, was delivering a privilege speech in which he criticized President Carlos P. Garcia’s veto of the anti-graft bill.

Apparently, Garcia had objected to a provision banning relatives of the president, vice president, Senate president, or House Speaker within the third degree of consanguinity or affinity to directly or indirectly intervene in any business transaction, contract, or application with the government. Exempted from the ban were relatives who had already been dealing with the government before these public officials’ assumption of office.

In his speech, Osmeña had also said Garcia had “10 million reasons” for vetoing the rice and corn nationalization bill and cited published reports that the president was tolerating “corruption, percenting and graft.” He then called on his peers to override the president’s veto, saying, “By this act (veto), Mr. President, you have announced to the entire world that you are on the side of the crooks and racketeers who surround you and infest the government.”

By today’s standards, Osmeña’s speech would be considered quite tame. But those were the days when parties still mattered, and the congressman from the Liberal Party had made his remarks in a Nacionalista-dominated House. Instead of supporting him, Osmeña’s colleagues turned on him, declaring his speech “unparliamentary.” They also said he had having “directly attacked, without basis in truth and in fact, the President of the Philippines, in the most scurrilous, malicious, reckless and irresponsible manner…impaired the dignity and prestige of the presidency and violated the honored traditions of inter-departmental courtesy and harmony between the executive and legislative branches of the government.”

San Juan Rep. Jose Mari Gonzalez also got the ire of many of his peers in the 11th Congress after he slapped sergeant-at-arms Bayani Fabic during the chamber’s tense impeachment proceedings against then President Joseph Estrada. But because Gonzalez owed up to what he had done and apologized to Fabic, the committee on ethics only reprimanded him. (Fabic, however, would not be appeased so easily and went all the way to court and had Gonzalez arrested shortly after the 2001 elections.)

Ironically, the House has a history of being more forgiving toward legislators who have done much worse than Gonzalez. In 1955, for instance, a House committee investigating an infraction committed by Rep. Rodolfo Ganzon decided not to push through censuring him after he apologized to those he had offended. Ganzon’s disorderly behavior: At a closed-door hearing of the committee on labor and industrial relations, he had drawn and leveled his pistol at Rep. Justino Benito during a heated exchange.


SOMETIMES, the House junks a complaint because the one who filed it has lost interest in pursuing it, at least in Congress. Josefino ‘Bujie’ Manansala, for example, withdrew his complaint against Bulacan Rep. Wilhelmino Sy Alvarado last June, saying he would try his luck in the courts instead. Alvarado is Manansala’s uncle. But neither blood ties nor his being a legislator stopped Alvarado from trying to slam his nephew’s face on a table at a wedding in May 2002, and then firing an Uzi in front of Manansala’s house while shouting expletives at him.

Manansala’s complaint was sworn and accompanied by a police investigation report, as well as a resolution from the Hagonoy Sanggunian condemning Alvarado’s alleged actions. Why Manansala decided not to push through with his complaint is anybody’s guess. But then it’s not as if legislators are falling over themselves to encourage complainants. Although congressmen seem to devote a lot of time deliberating over many of the complaints, the result of that is by the time the House has adjourned, no resolution is made and the complaints are banished to the archives, most of them sure never to see the light of day again.

The rules set by the House also seem to have shielded legislators more than they have protected the public from erring congressman. Take the one that says the House committee on ethics acquires jurisdiction over complaints only when the alleged acts or omissions were committed by the legislator during his or her incumbency. That means there is no chance that the current Congress—the 12th—will look into the acts of a member that were committed in the 11th House, or when the legislator was still in another public office or in the private sector.

This was the position of the present House’s ethics committee when it dismissed a complaint against Rep. Rolex Suplico. The Iloilo congressman had been charged with abusing his authority and committing conflicts of interest when, through a resolution during the 11th Congress, he “masterminded” the filing of a petition to revoke water permits issued to Kimberly Clark Philippines. The act had allegedly favored Goodwill Trading, one of whose shareholders happened to be Suplico’s father-in-law.

Yet another rule of the House committee on ethics states, “If the subject matter of the complaint against a member of the House of Representatives is pending in another judicial, quasi-judicial or administrative body, the Committee shall not take its case on the merits until final judgment has been rendered by such body.”

The House has long observed this principle of sub judice. In 1952, in the Second Congress, the committee on internal government and privileges decided to the sit on the case of rebellion with murder and arson—a nonbailable offense—against Rep. Narciso Umali. This was despite the Court of First Instance in Quezon having already convicted him of the same crime, for which he had drawn a sentence of life imprisonment. But since the case was still on appeal, the House cited legislative precedents in the United States and Philippines that “frown upon the suspension of a member of the House during the pendency of a criminal case against him in view of the great evil of depriving his constituents of their rightful representation in Congress.”

What Umali had done, according to court records, was this: He had asked Huk rebels to stage a raid in Tiaong, Quezon in the evening of November 14, 1951 in a bid to eliminate his political rival, Mayor Marcial Punzalan. The rebels burned down several houses, including that of Punzalan’s, and looted two stories. The rampage left one policeman and two civilians killed, and six others wounded.

In 1954, the Supreme Court affirmed the lower court’s ruling, although it said Umali and his two co-defendants were guilty of sedition, not rebellion. By then Umali was no longer a congressman.

Decades later, the 10th House would also refuse to suspend Agusan del Sur Rep. Ceferino Paredes, who had been charged with graft by the Ombudsman for acts he committed when he was governor. The Sandiganbayan had ordered the House to suspend Paredes for 90 days, an order that was affirmed by the Supreme Court. But the lower chamber, then led by Speaker Jose de Venecia, rallied behind Paredes, and even threatened to cut the budgets of the Ombudsman and judiciary to P1 year if these insisted on implementing the suspension order.

The sub judice rule has benefited many other congressmen, especially after it was broadened in the early 1990s to include cases pending not only before the courts, but even before the prosecutor’s office, Ombudsman, or other investigatory bodies. Small wonder that Baltazar Judith, a former legislative staff officer of Lanao del Sur Rep. Mariano Badelles, was “very disgusted” when the 9th House would not take up his complaint against the Mindanao congressman for nonpayment of salary, withholding salary differential and benefits, forgery of his signature, and falsification of checks—all because a similar case was pending before the Ombudsman.

Juliet Anosan, an accountant of the Department of Public Works and Highways (DPWH) in the Cordillera Administrative Region, probably felt more than disgust when the 9th House set aside her widely publicized complaint against Mountain Province Rep. Victor Dominguez. The House’s reason was that the case was also pending before the Ombudsman and the Baguio prosecutor’s office.

Anosan had gotten entangled with Dominguez when she refused to release a P1.85- million check to a construction company owned by the legislator’s brother-in-law. The DPWH had earlier rescinded its contract with the firm. In retaliation, Dominguez had reportedly not only threatened Anosan, but had also had her mauled and later gotten her transferred to the Manila office.

It was the sub judice rule as well that spelled the end to Marawi City Mayor Abbas S. Basman’s complaint against Lanao del Sur Rep. Mamintal N. Adiong during the 10th House. Adiong had taken his nephew Fais Ambol (alias Commander Cobra) into his custody when the latter was being arrested for the kidnap-slay of 17 engineers and workers of the National Power Corp. The legislator had failed to turn over Ambol to the police and prosecutor when asked to do so. Worse, while under Adiong’s custody, Ambol led a band that ambushed a police patrol team and killed a police captain.

So far, though, Zamboanga del Norte Rep. Romeo Jalosjos has been the biggest beneficiary of the sub judice rule. In 1997, Jalosjos was convicted in the lower courts for raping an 11-year-old, among other things. Yet despite repeated calls for his expulsion, the House allowed him to remain in office, even while under detention, in the 10th, 11th, and early part of the 12th Congress until his conviction became final.

The Supreme Court, however, refused to let Jalosjos out of jail to attend sessions of Congress while his case was pending. It observed, “(T)here is an unfortunate misimpression in the public mind that election or appointment to high government office, by itself, frees the official from the common restraints of general law.”

Jalosjos was finally dropped from the chamber’s roster in 2002, when the Supreme Court upheld the lower court’s decision to sentence him to reclusion perpetua on two counts of statutory rape and six counts of acts of lasciviousness.


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