Mansplaining procedures and force majeure
The current Philippine Senate is quite a mixed bag of individuals who, when in session, have displayed utter disregard for established rules of procedure for a legislative body considered to be the highest in the country. This is true with the members of the present profile of the majority members—12 of them in that erstwhile august body.
There used to be a time when the Senate was a hallowed institution. It used to be a hall that reverberated with passionate voices of true statesmen and women, among them legal luminaries, bar topnotchers, nationalists, and activists, whose main motivation was to craft relevant and significant laws for the people they served. Certainly, they were not perfect, but they were credible and respectable. A lot of them have consistently shown mental acuity, integrity, and probity over years of endless debates in the Senate.
The second week of May 2026 was truly a historical event, but not in a significant way. It was a precursor of the Senate’s descent into a circus of men and women, who have blatantly ditched age-old conventions of the Senate, just to protect a member who is now a fugitive from the law.
Sen. Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, who has been absent from the Senate for almost seven months, suddenly appeared in the Senate in the evening of May 14, 2026. Dela Rosa claimed later that he had “to appear” that night to provide the last vote to ensure a majority to change the leadership of the Senate. He said Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano called him up for this purpose. But he noticed that agents of the National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) were also waiting for him to serve him with the warrant of arrest issued by the International Criminal Court for his vital role in committing alleged crimes against humanity associated with the deadly war on drugs of former President Rodrigo Duterte.
Dela Rosa also said later that had he known he was going to be arrested, he would not have appeared then.
After Dela Rosa’s sudden appearance, mayhem seemed to have overcome the crowd in the Senate, including some NBI agents and Senate security officers. Gunshots were heard within the Senate, and several senators, including Dela Rosa, scampered for safety, or in his case, obviously to escape from being arrested.
This was when a staged “action drama” took place in the Senate that reduced it to a spectacle of unprecedented ignominy, drawing huge jeers and mocking reactions from netizens. In the wake of this pathetic spectacle, Cayetano pounded on the podium claiming the Senate “was under attack.” This claim was proven to be false since the trajectory of the bullets fired on that night showed they were fired from the inside of the Senate.
Then came the mansplaining. Sen. Rodante Marcoleta, a member of the new majority in the Senate, proposed a change in the rules of procedure to allow an absentee senator to participate via teleconferencing or other social media platforms.
When minority group member Sen. Risa Hontiveros argued against this, citing that only extreme emergencies brought about by “acts of God” or other uncontrollable events can justify a change in the rules. To this, Marcoleta berated her, saying that she is not a lawyer, and that makes her ignorant of “legal procedures.”
Mansplaining is an act of a man explaining something to a woman in a condescending or patronizing manner, assuming that she lacks knowledge of the topic, and degrading her expertise on the topic. This term was first coined in an essay written by feminist author Rebecca Solnit in 2008, which she later published as part of a book, “Men Explain Things to Me,” in 2014.
In a social media post, Sen. Robinhood Padilla tried to mansplain the reason for Marcoleta’s proposal. Padilla claims that the recent wars in the Middle East and the global economic crisis, including the current El Niño phenomenon, can be reasons for allowing Dela Rosa to participate in Senate sessions virtually, since these are considered “force majeure.”
As many of us know, force majeure is part of a contractual clause where a partner in a contract may not fulfill their obligations if there are uncontrollable events, like catastrophic earthquakes, typhoons, and other calamities that prevent the normal conduct of business. Wars could also be considered, but these have to create massive destruction that prevents people from reporting to the office to do their jobs. Absent these conditions, events described by Padilla are not “force majeure,” and therefore, no legal reason to allow the virtual presence of a senator for required deliberations.
Such an explanation typifies Padilla’s brand of mansplaining in an arrogant and confident way every time something happens that affects him personally, his interests for political preservation, and his blind loyalty to the Dutertes.
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