How correct was Shakespeare!

I was overwhelmed by the number of outputs our House of Representatives performed in the last few days leading to their recess. There was the drafting of the Articles of Impeachment against Chief Justice Ma. Lourdes Sereno, the vote to postpone the elections for barangay and Sangguniang Kabataan officials, and the almost unanimous preference of the legislators to allow divorce.

For months, we were entertained by the members of Committee of Laws of the Lower House in their search for probable cause to impeach Sereno. Admittedly, they were doing a constitutional duty and probably more such that we are supposed to thank them. I say more because I noticed an unprecedented display of zeal. For instance, the Committee tackled the delay of the Supreme Court in ruling a petition to transfer the venue of the trial in the case against Mautes from Marawi City to somewhere else. Actually, they only wanted to show to the public that the Sereno court took three months to rule on the plea to change venues. Let us not just count the many months spent by Congress to determine if the initiatory impeachment pleading had sufficient form and substance. To compare, the speakership of Manuel Villar handling the impeachment of then president Joseph Estrada took only days to rifle the complaint to the Senate.

To understand our congressmen’s sense of timing, we ask how long it took them to decide on postponing the barangay elections? I reckon they spent about a third only of the period they dwelt on the impeachment articles.

The third measure which the Lower House acted on was the divorce bill. It was the Speaker’s baby. According to a PDP-Laban insider, talking more in general rather than specific terms, the proposed legislation got the highest attention of the Speaker because of his reported marital issue. Our lawmakers conveniently misread the constitutional provision on the inviolability of marriage as a social institution in giving those with failed marriages chance to escape from such failures. A few among them, though, including our own Rep. Raul del Mar, for whom I doff my hat, made a gallant stand on the sanctity of marriage.

Against the rambunctious claim of the House of Representatives that they accomplished so much before going on a recess, let us assess the legislative terrain. We need to do this because before our lawmakers broke off in December last year, they proudly claimed to have passed the TRAIN law. We were made to believe that it was necessarily for our people to go higher in our economic status. Unfortunately, that law has only added difficulty to most of us. Therefore, with that sad experience of our legislators’ writing the TRAIN statute that, to me, spelled our added burden, we can ask our congressmen to show us what bill they produced that would lift the economic condition of the poor among us.

Will the life of Jessie, my barber, or Raul, our driver, or of Tino, our BIR coordinator improve in terms of qualify, with the impeachment of Sereno, or the postponement of the barangay elections, or the passage of the divorce bill? I can bet my last peso on the argument that these kinds of legislative outputs do not, in any manner, make our poor people enjoy a better life. Jessie never had been into any litigation. Raul does not have any plan to join politics. Tino has remained single all these years. The boast of our Congress to have produced milestone efforts is, to them quoting Shakespeare, “much ado about nothing!”