THE controversial 19th-century French poet Baudelaire wrote: “The Devil’s finest trick is to persuade us he doesn’t exist.” In today’s politics, the finest trick has been the portrayal by the Marcos regime that the president had nothing to do with Sherwin Gatchalian becoming Senate president, that he was chosen by a majority of the senators, who saw him as the best man to lead the chamber.

Tell that to the Marines. It is so obvious that it was Marcos who placed Gatchalian in that post. Marcos lost control of the Senate last May 11 when the independent bloc headed by Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano with a 13-man majority kicked out his man, Sen. Tito Sotto.

Marcos scrambled and first got the International Criminal Court to issue a warrant of arrest on Sen. Ronald de la Rosa, reportedly through the lobbying of suspected communist cadre Kristina Conti, who managed to be appointed as “assistant to counsel” in the ICC. After casting his vote to elect Cayetano to head the Senate, de la Rosa was forced to go into hiding to avoid an alleged warrant of arrest from a foreign court, with the National Bureau of Investigation sending over a hundred of its armed-to-the-teeth personnel to the Senate to arrest him. The willy de la Rosa outsmarted them and escaped the dragnet, although he can’t attend the Senate sessions anymore.

JUNE 17, 2026, will be remembered as a day of infamy in our political history: the moment when the sitting president effectively seized control of a key pillar of the Republic — the Senate — with Sen. Joel Villanueva’s capitulation.

Sen. Alan Peter Cayetano reported that Villanueva had confided that the graft charges against him involving the flood control scam would be accelerated, even elevated to a plunder charge that allows no bail, if he did not cooperate with Malacañang. Most Filipinos also believed that it was a similar threat that pushed Sen. Francis Escudero to join the Marcos bloc last June 3.

The capture of the upper chamber by Malacañang has been executed through a proxy — now Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, whose family conglomerate depends on the president’s grace for its very survival.

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IT is scandalous that mainstream media and 12 pro Marcos senators have so casually dismissed a 31 page, notarized the joint affidavit by 18 to 19 former Marines and security men, when it contains the most damaging accusations against this administration, the biggest case of corruption in our history. It is stunning that Liberal Party senators, the Pinks and the Reds — once virulent critics of the Marcos kleptocracy — have closed their eyes to the accusation, in total servility to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr.

Marcos’ minions in the Senate illegally usurped that chamber’s leadership for the two main purposes of suppressing the ex soldiers’ explosive testimony to bury the accusations against him and his family, as well as his allies and later, and to railroad Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment.

There has never been such many accusers in our political history: the handful of witnesses in the Priority Development Assistance Fund and Janet Napoles cases is tiny compared with the number of named, uniformed men signing a single 31 page sworn affidavit. When 18 Marines and security operatives step forward together, under oath, to admit participation in suitcase deliveries and to name their superiors, the burden of proof shifts; we are no longer dealing with an isolated tattler but with something closer to a battalion’s mutiny against a corrupt chain of command.

All this makes the sneering putdowns of Sen. Raffy Tulfo — who reduces them to mere “cargadores,” as if they were brainless porters rather than ex Marines sworn to follow orders — not just unfair but obscene: It spits on their risk and operational experience while ass-kissing the very officials they say commanded the deliveries. But then it is totally beyond college-dropout Tulfo to think that ordinary people would have a sense of justice as to rebel against the corrupt and powerful.

THE Marcos bloc in the Senate struggling to implement the budding dictator’s two-pronged agenda to bar through impeachment Vice President Sara Duterte’s presidential candidacy in 2028, and the investigation of the massive flood control scam has gone berserk. It has sunk to the depths of depravity, blatantly violating the Constitution and the Senate’s own rules.

On the last session day of the 20th Congress, with the chamber about to adjourn sine die, 11 of the Marcos senators deceived the nation into believing that the defection of Sen. Francis Escudero, who had hitherto been with the bloc led by Senate President Alan Peter Cayetano, to their cabal made them the majority.

They claimed that they were authorized by the Constitution and the body’s rules to replace committee chairmen and the Senate president pro tempore who had been elected only three days before. And within the hour, Malacañang issued a statement giving its blessing to the whole performance as “the rule of law.” It most certainly was not.

WAKE up, folks. What we are seeing now can’t be trivialized, much less ridiculed — as Marcos’ commentariat corps have been doing — as the “Senate circus,” “zarzuela” and “telenovela.” What is happening is as serious as can be for the Republic: This president is on an all-out siege of a supposedly independent branch of government, the Senate, considered as the last bastion of a democracy, in order to continue in power in 2028.

President Marcos’ media minions have also adopted a propaganda tack of portraying the 13 independent senators — especially Senate President Alan Cayetano — as degrading that body, rather than defenders of it.

“Bilog ang mundo” is certainly a Filipino understatement to describe that even Cory Aquino’s prime mouthpieces 40 years ago — the likes of the Monsod couple and her favorite Senate president Franklin Drilon who have spent their lives condemning the dictator Marcos — have been dragged from retirement to be bashers of the rebellious 13. I doubt if Lorna Kapunan, said to be one of the country’s most expensive lawyers, is appearing in TV talks shows to criticize the new Senate leadership pro bono. Why, this is the first time she is dabbling in politics.