The missing case

On June 4, 2026, the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP), through its Board of Governors, released a statement on what constitutes a quorum for the Senate to conduct official business. It said the June 3 Senate session was valid.

So did a formidable roster of law deans, professors, and political theorists, among them retired Supreme Court justice Adolfo Azcuna and constitutional expert and former UP Law Dean Pacifico Agabin. They cited Avelino v. Cuenco, the 1949 case in which the Supreme Court read “a majority of each House” to mean a majority of those who can actually be made to attend, not a majority of every name on the roll.

On the other side, over the weekend, four Cebu lawyer-politicians, several of them tied to the local opposition and some openly aligned with the Duterte camp, pushed back. They said the IBP does not speak for all lawyers and is not their “universal mouthpiece”, as one of them put it, since no referendum or chapter consultation preceded the IBP’s statement.

They are right that the IBP does not speak for all lawyers, and the IBP never claimed otherwise. It did not poll all 50,000 lawyers in the country. What it issued was an institutional position. And that is precisely the point people might miss. A statement does not need to be a plebiscite to carry weight.

The IBP Board of Governors occupies those seats because their own colleagues put them there. An institution is not the arithmetic sum of everyone’s private opinion on a given Tuesday. To say “they don’t represent every member” is both true and trivial. No governing body ever does.

In any case, the strongest arguments on either side are doctrinal, regardless of the political leanings or claimed objectivity of those speaking. So here’s the thing: why not bring the issue to the Supreme Court?

My wedding ninong, Atty. Jun Muntuerto, an IBP Golden Pillar Awardee who has practiced law for more than five decades, hit the nail on the head. He said the Board is entitled to its opinion, the dissenting lawyers to theirs, but until the Supreme Court authoritatively interprets the Constitution and the reach of Avelino on these facts, every one of us is merely talking. In constitutional disputes of this magnitude, he wrote in his online commentary, it is the Supreme Court that must speak for us all.

And for the Supreme Court to speak, someone has to formally ask it to. Senator Jose Avelino, the man who lost the gavel in 1949, filed a petition with the Supreme Court because he knew the remedy was in a court of law, not in the court of public opinion.

Now in the present controversy, where is the petition? As of last Friday, a case had reached the Supreme Court, but it was filed by a senior high school teacher. And it asked the justices to affirm the quorum and recognize the new majority, which is strange.

Practically, it should be the challengers of the quorum who must file and carry the burden, because they are the ones asserting constitutional noncompliance. Official acts are presumed regular until declared otherwise. Senator Alan Peter Cayetano, who calls June 3 a "trashing of our Constitution," has, as of this writing, filed nothing at all.

I wrote last Saturday about the political and legal drama being staged on our social media timelines. That is what we are seeing now in this issue --a spectacle performed in polished scripts, carried with surface-level eloquence by people who somehow never get around to the one thing that would actually settle the matter.