“There's no Clean Hands in a House of Corruption”
“Today, with a full heart and a clear conscience, I tender my resignation as Speaker of the House of Representatives. I do this so that the Independent Commission on Infrastructure may pursue its mandate freely and fully — without doubt, without interference, and without undue influence...”
Thus spoke Leyte first district Congressman Martin Romualdez as he walked off the Speaker’s rostrum, his words heavy with solemnity, his posture measured like a general laying down his sword. But beneath the polished rhetoric lies the grit of political maneuver, intrigue, and betrayal — all hallmarks of Philippine politics in the twilight of the Marcos-Duterte partnership.
Romualdez, first cousin of the President and once presumed heir to the ruling coalition’s legislative throne, fell not with a bang but with a bow. His resignation, framed as an act of sacrifice for “accountability and transparency,” came at the height of furor over the 2025 General Appropriations Act — branded by critics as one of the most corrupt spending bills ever passed. The storm had long been gathering. The name of Romualdez, and of his ally former appropriations chair Zaldy Co, became synonymous with questionable public works allocations, pork-barrel whispers, and opaque amendments.
The cracks were visible much earlier. A year ago, the House dared to probe Vice President Sara Duterte’s confidential funds, a move that detonated the alliance between the Marcoses and the Dutertes. The investigation, once tentative, spiraled into the first impeachment of a sitting vice president in decades. It was only a matter of time before Romualdez, seen as the chief architect of the inquiry, was himself targeted.
Now, in a move meant to steady the ship, Isabela Congressman Faustino “Bojie” Dy III assumes the Speaker’s chair. Dy, a Marcos loyalist but not a Romualdez intimate, vows “not to defend the guilty and not shield the corrupt.” His words land like a cold rebuke to his predecessor. But whether Dy is reformer or caretaker remains unclear.
The narratives surrounding Romualdez’s departure swirl like cigarette smoke in a backroom caucus. His loyalists insist he resigned to protect the House’s dignity, sparing it from the taint of scandal. Others claim he was pressed to go, convinced that a “leave of absence” would no longer suffice as anger mounted in the streets and within the chamber.
What is striking is the chorus of dissent from within Romualdez’s once-solid bloc. Cebu’s Duke Frasco, Navotas’ Tobias Tiangco, Bacolod’s Albee Benitez — all former allies — took turns needling his leadership, some openly siding with the Duterte camp. Even a greenhorn like 27-year-old Kiko Barzaga of Cavite flirted with the Speakership, though his candidacy was dismissed as youthful overreach.
In a different age, political bloodletting like this would have been muffled in committee rooms or resolved with velvet handshakes in Malacañang’s anterooms. But this is the 2020s: television cameras hum, the airwaves roar, and the chamber’s intrigues play out before a restless public.
Romualdez’s resignation may be styled as magnanimity, yet it is also survival — an attempt to retreat before the mob reaches the gates. In his own words: “I step down not in surrender, but in service — for sometimes, the greatest act of leadership is the grace to let go.” Grace, perhaps. But also necessity.
And in Philippine politics, the line between the two has always been thin. Especially now, when scandal piles upon scandal, and both the Marcos and Duterte camps are scrambling to seize the moral high ground, each asking the people to believe that they, not the other, are “the clean.” Yet behind the posturing, the closets are rattling with skeletons, the air heavy with the stench of old crimes and new schemes.
Remember: the country has not forgotten. The memories are not so distant that they can be erased with speeches, photo-ops, or cosmetic rebranding. They linger like unhealed wounds. The atrocities of the martial law years still cast their shadow — the arrests, the disappearances, the torture chambers whose victims have yet to find justice. The trails of Ferdinand Marcos Sr.’s ill-gotten wealth remain etched in court records and investigative archives: Swiss bank accounts, shell companies, offshore holdings hidden under aliases and dummy corporations. These are not relics of history but active scars, reminders of how power was converted into personal fortune while the nation bled. To this are added the more recent sins of the Dutertes. Rodrigo Duterte’s Oplan Tokhang and Double Barrel — operations that turned neighborhoods into war zones and left thousands dead — are tied not only to extrajudicial killings but to the machinery that funded them: a shadowy rewards system greased by Chinese-led online gambling operations. Sara Duterte, for her part, is haunted by her own scandal: the brazen misuse of confidential and intelligence funds, millions of pesos drained without clear accounting, justified with vague appeals to “national security.” For all their denials, these ghosts will not stay buried; they rise again whenever corruption and abuse are debated on the floor of Congress or in the streets.
And now, as though the weight of history were not enough, new revelations pile on top of the old. Budget insertions, carved in secrecy during midnight sessions, surface like rotten cargo in the daylight. Infrastructure projects are announced with pomp, yet either remain unfinished or collapse upon completion — bridges cracking within months, roads riddled with potholes before the year’s end, flood control systems that prove utterly useless after the first monsoon. Entire communities watch in frustration as contractors — often the same coddled firms recycled from one administration to another — grow fat from public funds, flaunting new mansions and SUVs, while the poor wade through waist-deep floodwater in their barangays.
What emerges is a grim continuity: the names at the top may change, dynasties may trade places in Malacañang or the halls of Congress, but the cycle endures. It is the same circle of bureaucrats, politicians, and cronies — the “bureaucrat capitalists” who treat governance as a family business and the national budget as their private treasury. They thrive in every season, whether under Marcos or Duterte, feeding off the same system, protected by the same impunity. And the people, time and again, are made to carry the weight of their greed.
And the people know it. They may not have the ledgers, but they live with the consequences: the potholes that never disappear, the bridges that collapse before completion, the schools promised but never built. They smell the rot every time a ribbon-cutting ceremony is held for a project that is already cracking. Whether the face on the tarpaulin is Marcos or Duterte, the stench of corruption is unmistakable — and intolerable.
This is why the public mood is darkening. What began as small, almost ceremonial protests against budget abuse and infrastructure anomalies could well explode into something more volatile. People need only look to Nepal or Indonesia for examples, where grievances long ignored boiled into riots that shook governments to their foundations. In Manila, Cebu, Davao — the conditions are present: inflation that squeezes the poor, calamities that expose the failures of governance, and a political class that dares to call itself “public servant” while feeding off the public purse. Names like Discaya, Arevalo, and Hernandez have already surfaced in connection with anomalous flood control projects — names not obscure to the common Filipino, for they are etched in billboards, in congressional districts, in the speeches of officials who promised much and delivered little. And the irony cuts deeper: even as Bulacan is swallowed by floods, even as Davao reels from swollen waterways, the very politicians representing those provinces stand accused of benefiting from the rot that has made those disasters worse.
So yes, the people demand the rule of law. But what rule of law exists when the law itself is twisted by those who write it? What justice can be expected when the accused are the very ones who sit in judgment? It is the great insult of our times: to watch the corrupt bend statutes to protect their interests, and then stand before cameras preaching reform. To see them reelected in landslides, their names etched once more in the halls of power, is an outrage beyond measure. Their words may change, their speeches polished with new promises, yet the spirit of their intent remains the same: to preserve wealth, power, and influence — with or without pork barrel, with or without shame.
And so the burden grows heavier on the people’s backs, and the patience thinner. For sure people still remembered Harry Roque talking about a battle between "darkness" and "evil", and people have enough from these two faces of "darkness" and "evil" both which are corrupt and cruel; so the question now is not whether the public will tolerate this farce forever, but when — and how — the reckoning will come.