In the Silence of the Senate, Avelino Speaks Still

In the Silence of the Senate, Avelino Speaks Still

José Avelino
(1890-1986)

When the Senate, by a margin too comfortable to ignore, moved to archive the impeachment case against Vice President Sara Duterte, they did not just mothball a piece of paper. They mothballed the people’s unease. They mothballed the demand for clarity. And they mothballed the one duty that a legislative chamber must never relinquish: the duty to test power, even if the power belongs to one of their own.

The press release language was neat. Due process. Jurisdiction. Ripeness of the case. These were the words they fed to the microphones.

But the people—those who have watched the fever of politics break into cold calculation—heard something else entirely: a retreat dressed in robes of decorum.

It is in moments like this that one remembers José Avelino.

Avelino, the Senate President who, in 1949, detonated the polite hypocrisies of his peers with a sentence that has survived longer than many of their careers: “What are we in power for? We are not hypocrites. Why should we pretend to be saints when in reality we are not? We are not angels. When we die, we will all go to hell. It is better to be in hell—because in that place, there are no investigations, no secretary of justice, no secretary of the interior to go after us.”

To polite society, it was a confession. To the cynics, a wink. But to those who understood the inner machinery of power, it was something rarer: the truth stripped of the perfume of self-righteousness. The words were scandalous in their candor, but they were also, in their own way, a provocation to honesty—an invitation to confront the gap between political sainthood and political reality.

In another hour of moral weight, he warned with biting irony: “We are not angels. When we die, we will all go to hell. It is better to be in hell—because in that place, there are no investigations, no secretary of justice, no secretary of the interior to go after us.”

Had Avelino lived to see this week, in this time when solons chose to archive the decision rather than wait for the courts, or even pursue as they've sworn to uphold accountability and transparency under the rule of law, he might have said something sharper: “Let there be a trial—otherwise we’re all but hypocrites who admit, ‘let’s go to hell and pretend it’s heaven.’”

But Avelino is gone, and with him the rare courage to be honest about what power is and what it is for. In another hour of moral weight, he once asked:

“Señor Presidente, ¿no es la verdad que sin hacerlos vigorosamente es traicionar y negar esencialmente nuestros deberes como sirvientes públicos? ¿Para qué está el nuestro mandato del pueblo?”

Why are we in power, if not to pursue the truth with vigor—especially when that truth is uncomfortable, especially when it implicates the powerful?

That is the marrow of representative government. And yet, this week, the Senate dodged the bone.

They did not defeat the charges; they merely declared them “unripe” and filed them away in the vault of procedural limbo. Archived, they called it.

One cannot fault the public for now speaking the tongue of clerks and lawyers. Moral clarity has grown scarce in high places. When morality fails, people cling to process—because process, at least, can be demanded in writing.

And let readers be clear: it is not sedition to ask for accountability. It is not destabilization to seek transparency. It is not political persecution to question the second-highest official in the land. It is democracy doing what it is meant to do—if only those entrusted with its tools remember how to use them.

The senators claim fidelity to the Constitution. But constitutions are not glass cases for display. They are living pacts, signed not in the ink of ceremony but in the daily transaction of trust between ruler and ruled. And this week, that trust took on water.

What is the Senate for, if not to sit in judgment—not just of law, but of conduct; not just of budget, but of principle? If it now serves only to protect the comfortable and shield the politically sacred, then it has ceased to be a Senate. It is a sanctuary.

And sanctuaries, history tells the people, are where the guilty wait for the storm to pass.

So let the record show: when the moment called for fortitude, most chose convenience.

When the nation needed clarity, it was offered delay.

When the people sought justice, they were told to wait for ripeness.

But truth does not spoil with time. It ferments. It sharpens. It returns with a smell that cannot be hidden.

And somewhere in the backbenches of memory, José Avelino still speaks—not to excuse the crookery of power, but to remind the people, the so-called "constituents", the "subjects of the law", of its naked shape.