[Pastilan] The Cayetano trick to winning arguments without making one

Law-making aside, where is Cayetano's great legal practice? The delusion that possessing a lawyer’s credential is proof of superiority is a particular species of arrogance that flourishes in public life these days. Senator Alan Peter Cayetano appears to be one of those infected by this. He carries his law degree into political arguments as if the letters A-T-T-Y were a badge of intellectual nobility and a license to sneer at anyone who dares to disagree without first producing a law degree of his own. It is as if one who disagrees needs to answer first if he is a lawyer. If the answer is “no” – there goes one’s argument, turned away at the credential checkpoint. This is credential worship – the delusion that a JD (Juris Doctor) degree can substitute for an argument, confusing that for wisdom, and a professional license for infallibility. It cannot. Law schools teach one about the law. Passing the bar makes one a lawyer. Neither confers a monopoly on intelligence nor grants one the right to treat every non-lawyer as a human footnote. The lawyer part does not make the politician part superior. It merely makes the politician a lawyer. That’s all, and that should be enough. But if this braggart wishes to use his law credential as a weapon against everyone who lacks it, he should not be surprised when someone asks the most impolite question of all: What has he actually done with such credentials? Cayetano was admitted to the Philippine Bar in 1998. Yes, that is a real achievement. It deserves respect. Yet his public CV tells a rather different story from the one his credential-based self-importance would have us believe. He was elected Taguig councilor in 1992 even before his college graduation, and served as one till 1995. He then served as vice mayor from 1995 to 1998, during which he earned his law degree and subsequently passed the bar exams. He became a congressman in 1998 and served three consecutive terms before becoming a senator in 2007. In 2016, he was the running mate of then presidential frontrunner Rodrigo Duterte. He lost. A year later, under Duterte’s “Tokhang” presidency, he became foreign affairs secretary. Then he returned to the Lower House in 2019 and stayed there until 2022 – serving as House speaker from 2019 to 2020. Then, having been elected senator once again in 2022, he eventually secured a place in the annals of political farce as having one of the shortest-lived Senate presidencies in recent memory – a tenure so brief and chaotic that it seemed less like a presidency than a clerical error that had somehow acquired a gavel. His is a career spent almost entirely in politics and government. But, law-making aside, where is Cayetano’s great legal practice? Where is the distinguished litigation record? Where are the celebrated cases, the courtroom victories, the body of work of a law practitioner that supposedly entitles him to look down on people who did not take the bar? It looks like the law degree is there, but the career in law practice is not. If law-making is to count as law practice, then Cayetano is, at the very least, on equal legal footing with senators Tito Sotto and Lito Lapid – without even factoring in the number of years each has spent in the Senate. A surgeon who spends his entire career as a hospital administrator remains a surgeon by training. But if he starts mocking non-surgeons while presenting his administrative career as proof of his surgical brilliance, someone is entitled to ask: Where are the patients? The same question applies in Cayetano’s case. There is something almost comical about a politician who has spent much of his adult life feeding off politics and has lived off taxpayers’ money for more than three decades now looking down on the very public – most of whom do not possess law degrees – that has paid his bills. These are the same “benighted” citizens who elected him, along with the other senators who somehow managed to enter the chamber without passing the bar, to speak on their behalf. One might think that, having been entrusted with a vote, they had earned the right to have an intelligent opinion. The Senate is not a courtroom in which only people capable of citing jurisprudence are allowed to speak. The country is not populated exclusively by lawyers, and it is kept alive by teachers, doctors, engineers, farmers, workers, entrepreneurs, soldiers and millions of ordinary citizens who manage to form intelligent opinions without first passing the bar. History, incidentally, is replete with tales of educated nincompoops. The world has never suffered from a shortage of people with impressive credentials and terrible judgment. Indeed, one need look no further than the Senate – or Alan Peter Cayetano himself. The question for Cayetano is not whether he has a law degree because everyone already knows that he has. The real question is whether that degree represents a lifetime of meaningful legal service or whether it is simply an expensive piece of paper being used as political decoration. History does not remember politicians because of their titles. It remembers what they did when they had power. Stop insulting non-lawyers. Pastilan. – Rappler.com How does this make you feel? Loading