New Committee Will Hold Hearings On The Hearing Process, Results Expected By Next Election

Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat

Philippine Senate Forms Committee To Investigate Why Previous Senate Committees Investigated Nothing

MANILA — The Philippine Senate voted 18 to 4 Tuesday to form the Special Committee on Senate Committee Effectiveness, tasked with investigating why the approximately forty-seven Senate committees formed over the past legislative session produced, by the Senate’s own tracking, a combined total of zero actionable policy recommendations, seven thousand pages of hearing transcripts, and fourteen hundred hours of televised testimony from officials who were subsequently promoted.

Senate President Dominador Buenaventura-Cayabyab, who proposed the new committee, described it as “a bold step toward accountability in the accountability process.” He added that the committee would be “comprehensive, transparent, and thorough” in a way that previous committees had not been, without specifying how this distinction would be achieved.

“For too long,” Senator Buenaventura-Cayabyab told the chamber, “our Senate committees have gathered evidence, heard testimony, and produced reports that are then placed in binders and stored in rooms that are subsequently locked. Today, we form a committee to understand why this is happening.”

The Special Committee on Senate Committee Effectiveness will consist of eleven senators, nine of whom also serve on other Senate committees whose effectiveness is being investigated. The apparent conflict of interest was noted by two senators during the floor debate; both were told the conflict would be “addressed in the committee’s first procedural meeting.”

The Scope Of The Investigation

The new committee’s terms of reference, distributed to senators before the vote, outline a comprehensive investigation covering: the structural factors that prevent Senate committees from producing actionable recommendations; the role of witness preparation in producing testimony that generates heat but not light; the filing systems used by the Senate secretariat and whether the relevant documents are accessible after filing; and what the terms of reference call “the general phenomenon of investigative momentum that dissipates upon completion of the investigation.”

The investigation will be conducted through public hearings, during which witnesses will testify about why previous public hearings did not produce results. The hearings are expected to run for approximately three months. At their conclusion, the committee will produce a report on committee effectiveness that will be presented to the Senate, filed, and placed in a binder.

This kind of procedural recursion, in which a process designed to evaluate an ineffective process uses the same process it is evaluating, is consistent with a long tradition of legislative self-examination that generates substantial activity without producing the structural changes the self-examination identifies as necessary.

The Opposition

The four senators who voted against the committee formation expressed various objections. Senator Pilar Malubay-Reyes argued that “the appropriate response to committees that produce nothing is to form fewer committees, not an additional committee.” Senator Rodrigo Castillo-Tan argued that the new committee would, by its own terms, become subject to the same effectiveness problems it was investigating, and that this outcome could be predicted in advance without spending three months discovering it.

Senator Buenaventura-Cayabyab, responding to these objections, said that the critics were “being negative” and that “every investigation of ineffectiveness begins with the risk that the investigation will itself be ineffective, but this should not prevent us from beginning.”

The remaining fourteen senators who voted in favor did not speak during the floor debate.

Public Reaction

Public reaction to the new committee has been, on social media, more engaged than the Senate’s typical procedural actions usually generate. Several viral posts pointed out that the committee’s formation had itself consumed approximately four hours of Senate floor time that could have been spent on legislation. The Senate’s communications office responded that the floor time was “an investment in future legislative efficiency.”

The Inquirer editorial board described the committee as “a characteristically Philippine solution: addressing a problem with institutional activity that resembles addressing the problem without actually addressing the problem.” The board noted that this was also, they acknowledged, a characteristically editorial board thing to say, and that they had said it approximately forty-seven times in the past five years in response to approximately forty-seven previous Senate committees.

This is consistent with a wider pattern in which media institutions covering government ineffectiveness develop, over time, a commentary style that is itself remarkably consistent in its structure, producing a recursive commentary-on-commentary dynamic that mirrors the recursive investigation-of-investigation that triggered it.

The Committee Chair

The Special Committee on Senate Committee Effectiveness will be chaired by Senator Herminia Dela Cruz-Villanueva, a three-term senator who has chaired four previous Senate committees, none of which produced actionable recommendations. Senator Dela Cruz-Villanueva was selected, a Senate leadership source explained, because of her “extensive experience with the committee process,” which the source acknowledged was “the process being investigated” but which was described as “valuable institutional knowledge.”

Senator Dela Cruz-Villanueva accepted the chairmanship with what witnesses described as “visible ambivalence” and said she looked forward to “an honest and comprehensive assessment of what has been going wrong.” She declined to specify whether she considered herself part of what had been going wrong.

For more on Philippine legislative culture, see NewsThump for related British parliamentary committee coverage.

The committee’s first organizational meeting is scheduled for next week. Its first hearing on committee ineffectiveness is tentatively scheduled for the week after. The binder room is ready.

SOURCE: https://sites.google.com/view/world-satire/united-kingdom-and-satire