Questioning the Senate
If you look at the Senate these days, what you see is not exactly an institution radiating gravitas. You see hyper-partisanship.
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If you look at the Senate these days, what you see is not exactly an institution radiating gravitas. You see hyper-partisanship.
Recent events in the Senate have resulted in something that, until not too long ago, would have seemed almost unthinkable. They have made the argument for abolishing the Senate feel less like a fringe proposal and more like a serious question that ordinary Filipinos can now reasonably ask. And that is no small thing.
The 1986 Constitutional Commission did not begin with the Senate as a given. The original instinct, as many have long noted, was toward a unicameral legislature. Only later, and by a relatively close vote, was the bicameral setup ultimately adopted. The logic was straightforward enough.
The House of Representatives, made up largely of locally elected officials, would bring to the table the immediate concerns of districts, cities, provinces and communities. The Senate, elected at large, would provide a broader, more national perspective. If the House spoke for localities, the Senate was supposed to speak for the Republic.
That extra layer was always a bit clunky. It meant slower lawmaking, more negotiation, more overlap, and, of course, more expense. But it was justified by the idea that the Senate would serve as a kind of institutional grown-up in the room. A chamber of national vision, long-range thinking, and, when necessary, principled restraint.
The question now is brutally simple: is that still what we have?
Because if you look at the Senate these days, what you see is not exactly an institution radiating gravitas. You see hyper-partisanship. You see senators entangled in major scandals. You see shameless deference to powerful political figures. And, lately, you see spectacles that would have been dismissed as absurd and unthinkable a decade ago.
A senator facing possible arrest in connection with crimes against humanity literally stumbled into the Senate pursued by law enforcers and was given refuge by his colleagues. The Senate itself was then placed on lockdown as law enforcement tried to serve legal processes. Reports then followed of gunshots being fired inside the Senate halls, with subsequent accounts pointing to the Senate’s own security side as the source of the shots.
At the same time, public pressure mounted over the Senate’s apparent reluctance to perform its constitutional duty to convene as an impeachment court should the House transmit articles of impeachment against Vice President Sara Duterte, with lawmakers and law deans publicly reminding the chamber that this is not optional.
Read that again. A chamber once associated with statesmanship is now generating headlines that sound like a cross between a constitutional crisis and a slapstick farce.
And that is what makes this moment so dangerous for the Senate as an institution. The damage is no longer just ideological or partisan. It is existential. The traditional defense of the Senate has always been that, whatever its flaws, it performs a distinct national function. It tempers the House. It broadens debate. It protects the constitutional order when political winds turn reckless.
But if it will not perform its basic constitutional duty, if it will openly and brazenly shield its own, if it will bend itself around personalities and privileges, then what exactly is left of that defense?
This is especially painful to ask because the Senate has, at many moments in our history, lived up to its promise. It has produced figures of courage, eloquence and principle. It has stood, more than once, as a brake on abuse. That is precisely why its current state feels so depressing. The fall is harder because the standard once stood so high.
Still, sentimentality is no substitute for institutional honesty. If the Senate no longer provides the national vision, restraint, and constitutional fidelity that were used to justify its existence, then it is no longer enough to defend it out of habit or nostalgia.
At that point, asking whether we still need it is not reckless. It is responsible. And it is necessary.
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