Of Avelino’s Ghost and the Senate’s Unpaid Bill
What makes the present crisis dangerous is not that politicians are fighting.
Politicians fight everywhere. The British Parliament in Westminster has survived fistfights, expulsions, rebellions, and constitutional crises. The United States Senate in Capitol has survived secession, civil war, canings, shutdowns, and bitter partisan warfare. The French National Assembly has seen more collapses and reinventions than many countries experience in a century.
Legislatures are not monasteries. They are arenas of conflict. However, the problem begins when the arena itself becomes contested ground.
That is the deeper issue confronting the Philippine Senate today. The question is no longer merely whether one faction has the numbers, whether one presiding officer has the gavel, whether one committee may summon witnesses, or whether one walkout was justified. Those are symptoms. The disease is more serious: the growing inability of political actors to agree on the source of legitimacy itself.
One faction points to the Senate Rules. Another points to the Constitution. Another points to precedent. Another points to numbers. Another points to political reality. Another points to public mandate. Increasingly, each side recognizes only the authority that benefits its own position.
Everything else becomes optional.
This is not merely a Senate problem. It is becoming a Philippine problem.
Jose Avelino was perhaps lucky to have been long dead before this present spectacle.
Were he alive, reporters would surely be chasing him for comment, not because he would offer moral clarity, but because his old and brutal question has become painfully relevant again: what are they in power for?
That question now hovers over the Senate like an unpaid bill.
Are the senators defending the Constitution, or merely defending their chairs? Are they protecting the institution, or only their faction’s access to power? Are they invoking rules because they believe in order, or because the rules happen to wound the other side today?
Avelino’s infamous line was scandalous because it said aloud what politics usually hides. Today, the public may ask the same thing with even less innocence. Are these good crooks fighting bad crooks, or bad crooks fighting good crooks? Or is the distinction itself part of the performance, with each bloc claiming virtue only because the other side currently holds the gavel?
The present Senate crisis did not arise in a vacuum. It followed the extraordinary spectacle of Senator Ronald dela Rosa becoming the central figure in a confrontation that transformed the Senate from a chamber of legislation into a stage of institutional breakdown. What should have been a constitutional body began to look like contested territory.
There was the chase. There was the confusion. There were reports of gunfire within the Senate complex. There were conflicting accounts from police, security officials, and political actors. There was the sight of public authority itself appearing uncertain about who commanded what, who could enter where, and whose order prevailed inside the building.
Then came the deeper political wound: dela Rosa’s sudden reappearance to help install Alan Peter Cayetano as Senate President, followed by his disappearance once more. In that moment, the question of leadership became inseparable from the question of legitimacy. The public was no longer watching a normal election of officers. It was watching a chamber ask the country to accept a leadership produced under circumstances already clouded by evasion, force, factional maneuver, and constitutional doubt.
From there, the Senate descended into rival claims of authority. The minority bloc denounced Cayetano. Walkouts followed. Hearings were questioned. Committee leaderships became contested. Sessions failed. The Senate, which was supposed to sit in judgment of other constitutional actors, could not settle the authority of its own presiding officer without dragging the country into a legal and political fog.
Ironically, it was the present solons themselves who revived that long-sleeping decision. Avelino v. Cuenco had rested on the shelves of constitutional memory, rarely discussed outside law classrooms and political history, until the Senate’s own paralysis made it relevant again. Now that the case has returned, some would like to dismiss it as moot, academic, obsolete, or merely inconvenient.
But the courts have kept that decision alive. No Constitution has abrogated it. No later charter has erased it. No controlling doctrine has buried it. For now, "Avelino" remains part of the living architecture of Philippine constitutional law.
That is why the contrast becomes cruel.
The solons of the past were no angels. They skirted the law when it suited them. They fought for office, privilege, and survival. Yet even in their worst moments, there remained enough institutional shame to understand that the law could not simply be discarded whenever it became inconvenient. They maneuvered around it, tested its limits, and occasionally stretched it to the breaking point, but they still understood one basic truth: a constitutional order cannot survive if every faction treats precedent as disposable.
That is why the quorum issue matters. It is not merely a question of twelve or thirteen bodies occupying seats in a chamber. It is a question of whether procedure is being used to preserve the Senate, or merely to preserve a faction within it. In a chamber already burdened by public distrust, the legal argument must be cleaner than the politics surrounding it.
The law may be inconvenient, but inconvenience is not repeal. *Avelino* cannot be declared dead simply because his ghost has appeared at an awkward moment for an awkward cause.
The Senate’s defenders may say that politics has always been rough, that parliamentary battles have always involved numbers, tactics, absences, alliances, and betrayals. That is true enough. But this present crisis is not merely rough politics. It is a crisis of institutional confidence.
When a chamber cannot meet, cannot agree on who may preside, cannot determine which committees may function, and cannot persuade the public that its own rules mean the same thing from one day to the next, the problem has already gone beyond ordinary factional combat.
The business community should pay attention to this. Investors do not merely invest in growth rates. They invest in predictability. Capital can tolerate taxation. It can tolerate regulation. It can tolerate labor disputes. What capital fears most is uncertainty.
A legislature unable to determine its own authority sends a signal that uncertainty is spreading upward through the political system itself. Foreign governments notice. Credit agencies notice. Civil servants notice. Local executives notice. Ordinary citizens notice.
The issue is therefore larger than a Senate presidency. It is larger than a quorum dispute. It is larger than Ronald dela Rosa. It is larger than Alan Peter Cayetano. It is even larger than the impeachment controversy hovering behind these events.
The real issue is whether institutions still possess authority independent of the factions temporarily occupying them.
For if authority resides only in personalities, then every transition becomes a crisis. Every election becomes existential. Every defeat becomes intolerable. Every political dispute becomes a struggle not merely for office, but for survival.
That is how republics become unstable. Not always through a single coup. Not always through a single dictator. Not always through one dramatic constitutional amendment. Often, republics decay by installments: one ignored rule, one discarded precedent, one opportunistic interpretation, one factional emergency at a time.
The spectacle also exposes the poverty of strongman rhetoric. For the diehard Duterte supporter who defends his idol’s bloodied record, for the remorseless Marcos loyalist who still excuses Martial Law despite its immense crimes and failures, for every online partisan who speaks endlessly of discipline, authority, obedience, and command, one may ask: where is their celebrated principle now?
Where is their local version of the *Führerprinzip*, their crude *Pangulo Principle*, their belief that decisive leadership can cut through every democratic inconvenience?
If leadership is supreme, why does every dispute collapse into procedural trench warfare? If command is the answer, why are its loudest advocates suddenly reduced to arguing over quorum, recognition, committee jurisdiction, and parliamentary interpretation? If the strong leader solves all, why does the strongman camp tremble when the rules are turned against it?
The answer is not difficult. Much of this politics of strength is strength only online. It is loud in comment sections, brutal in slogans, and merciless in slurs. It calls every legal challenge rebellion, every objection destabilization, every critic a traitor. Yet when confronted by the complexities of constitutional government, it becomes a paper tiger.
It discovers, too late, that the law is not merely a weapon to be used against enemies. It is also a cage that may close around one’s own faction.
Those accused of rebellion may, in fact, be doing something more lawful than their accusers understand. They are using the law to expose flaws within the law itself. That is not anarchy. That is constitutional politics. A legal order does not mature by pretending its contradictions do not exist. It matures when those contradictions are forced into the open and resolved through rules, courts, argument, and public judgment.
One suspects that had Senator Miriam Defensor Santiago been present, she would not have walked out merely because of Cayetano, nor because of any single faction. She would have walked out in disgust at the spectacle itself: senators fighting with extraordinary passion over chairs, titles, alignments, and procedural advantage while presenting each maneuver as a noble defense of constitutional principle.
Of course, even that image requires caution. Santiago herself was no stranger to brawls, feuds, and institutional combat, including her clashes with Juan Ponce Enrile. She was not a porcelain saint of parliamentary decorum. But precisely for that reason, she understood the difference between combat and farce. She knew that political battle could be brutal without becoming intellectually dishonest.
Speaking of Enrile, had he lived to see this present spectacle, one imagines he would already have produced a commentary heavy with recollection, law, precedent, and institutional memory. Whatever else may be said of him, Enrile understood the uses of legal architecture. He understood that one does not simply wave away past rulings by saying there are Senate rules and constitutional provisions in the present. The existence of present rules does not automatically erase prior judicial interpretation. Otherwise, every generation of politicians could pretend that law began only when their faction needed it.
That is the danger now. Some commentators speak as if precedent were an inconvenience to be managed, not a source of constitutional continuity. They argue as though the Senate Rules and the Constitution exist in splendid isolation, untouched by the decisions of courts and the accumulated memory of the Republic. But if past rulings may be disregarded merely because they complicate today’s preferred outcome, then what prevents tomorrow’s majority from doing the same?
The tragedy is not that politicians fight. Politicians have always fought. The tragedy is that every fight now insists on wearing the costume of constitutional salvation.
A chamber preparing to judge others has placed itself in the dock. A body expected to defend constitutional order has become proof of how fragile that order has become. The Senate asks the people to respect its dignity, yet dignity cannot be demanded by press conference, by roll call, by walkout, or by procedural trick. It must be earned by conduct.
And so Avelino’s ghost returns. Not as a hero. Not as a model nor a saint. He returns as an accusation with a blunt question: "What are they in power for? Are they there to legislate, to judge, to investigate, and to preserve the Republic? Or are they there to count bodies, seize gavels, protect allies, delay accountability, and wrap factional survival in constitutional language?"
The Senate should answer that question before pretending the public has not already guessed.