Digging their own grave?

THE House of Representatives never fails to render us speechless by their most unthinkable acts, especially this House of Representatives.

True, the commissioner of Commission on Human Rights (CHR) Commissioner Chito Gascon has brought politicking within the executive to a whole different level as he opts to bring with him the agenda of his party and not the good of the country. At least, that is how he is being projected by the national media, the same media that is painting the Administration black. But the high-handed manner of approving a P1,000 budget for a whole government body reeks of the arrogance that this House of Representatives has been showing since they took their oath.

If you are wondering where the call for revolutionary government that is making the rounds of social media is coming from, it's actually from what the President said when he was still doing the rounds for federalism in the February 2015.

"If you elect me, in six months to one year, I will try to fix [the] government. If I cannot get the reforms that I want, I will declare a revolutionary government. Then I will fix the government, I will close the congress. I was once a congressman. Then I’ll fix everything."

It has been more than a year now, and Congress seems to be on a path of destruction. But the greater concern remains to be illegal drugs and narco-politics, and so, there are things that have to be sidelined it seems. But we know, as we know the President knows, that there will be a time when he has to put his foot down and stop the circus that the Congress has made of itself.

We wait and remember other revelations the President has repeatedly said, among which was that he owes no one nothing. This is often said in tandem with his recollection of how his ragtag army weathered the seeming bottomless pockets of the other candidates with just one or two governors and one or two congressmen supporting him. This has become a repeated reminder that in the House of over a hundred representatives, only one or two are actually the President's allies.

Now, the congressmen who have aligned with the President comprise the super-majority, but we know them as they are: turncoats who are there for the power the President wields. Except that, they seem to be aping the iron-fisted governance style of the President, a style that does not fit since they were just elected into office by their constituents and not by the country. In short, they are but tiny rulers puffing themselves up in the shadow of a leader who has the support of millions. They should sooner or later realize, they are not and will never be.

True, the CHR has not done much, since it does not have any teeth, really. All it can do is recommend to the appropriate authorities. All that it can give is a sense of vindication, nothing concrete. The other agency given the same budget is the National Commission on Indigenous Peoples (NCIP), which has also been the brunt of a lot of complaints for seemingly siding with those lusting over the indigenous peoples' ancestral domains rather than protecting the IPs.

Then we glance the Congress' way and ask: What have they done for us?

The point here is that, yes, there are a lot of things that need to be done and corrected, the President himself has been pointing this out since the campaign period. But doing this with braggadocio and the arrogance of knowing that all these executive bodies are under the Congress' thumbs stirs up enmity among the people, and that enmity is not even directed at the President but the Congress. No wonder the call for a revolutionary government is slowly gaining ground.