TYBOX | Mansplaining Senator-Judge Padilla

MindaNews / 19 July 2026 – There are things we dread to see in the impeachment trial in the past two weeks.

Lawyers raising objections for five minutes straight. Lawyers spend one hour studying typo errors on a document. Senator siblings the Cayetanos lecturing us on the fine points of the law which they brag they learned from UP or Ateneo.

Then there’s Senator Robin Padilla inserting himself in the interregnum of the impeachment, interjecting questions that are not questions at all.

We should let this pass, because we need intermissions every now and then over the intense issues raised in the trial. 

We should also brace ourselves that this will continue in the coming months — that’s how long the impeachment will drag on.  The impeachment court can advise lawyers from both sides to cut down with the objections and the legal gobbledygook, but there is no way one can stop Padilla from standing and conjecturing what he thinks of the evidence and witnesses.

Watching the impeachment means having Senator Robin as part of your subscription package. You voted for this guy. You made him number one senator with 26 million fans, whose only credentials is his 40 years of acting the anti-hero, and singing “Wonderful Tonight” in all his sorties in 2022.

The only way we can console ourselves is to understand how Robinhood Padilla’s mind ticks in the course of the impeachment.

In the seriousness of things, how can he conjecture about Romanovs, communism, challenging NBI agents to learn Islam and face their cases, or to ask permission from whomever who livestreamed the online press conference?

These are questions one raises in a drinking session, not in a livestream impeachment. But Senator Robin channels that in all soberness and seriousness.

He’s channeling that drinking buddy vibe, the village philosopher who will wax about ideas, ideology, idols and indispensable life-and-death experiences like picking pulutan and deep-dive into it with every bottle drowned.

He’s channeling the contradictions in life. He is Muslim but believes in communism and idolizes an ex-president who bombed Marawi. He played Andres Bonifacio, met Joma Sison in Utrecht but doesn’t want to fight with China.

Isn’t he like our drinking tambay, who believes in many things, from Marx to the Bible to Red Horse, who curses at corruption but lines up every month for ayuda, who dreams of revolutions but gets triggered at rallies.

Maybe that’s why Senator Robin is the most relatable. His performative questions and statements in Tagalog projects him to the common tao, as someone who can stand side-by-side with seasoned legislators, lawyers and litigators with his UP (University of Prison) credential and try to figure out who’s right and who’s wrong.

But that is where the dread lies. Can he make a sound judgment from all the compilation of Marx, Quran, Che Guevara and history books he has absorbed, when the most fundamental thing he needs to read is the Constitution?

Or is he going to just drown on his own table? Like it’s late in the evening…. 

(MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Tyrone A. Velez is a freelance journalist and writer.)