FIRING LINE: The loss of delicadeza 

FIRING LINE: The loss of delicadeza 

By Robert B. Roque Jr. | May 26, 2026

While the Senate as we know it today invokes “tradition” on many occasions to determine how to proceed with the most challenging issues it is confronted with, the public can’t help but doubt whether tradition still holds its purpose in providing clarity, propriety, and integrity for the august body.

Because what the nation has witnessed these past two weeks was not tradition. It was institutional decay dressed up in parliamentary language.

Tradition, we were told, dictated how leadership transitions should happen. Tradition supposedly required “coordination” before a senator could be arrested within Senate grounds. Tradition was invoked to justify protective custody, closed doors, procedural delays, and extraordinary sensitivities for fellow lawmakers.

Yet oddly enough, tradition seemed absent when the Senate descended into a spectacle of shouting, panic, finger-pointing, and eventually gunfire inside one of the country’s highest democratic institutions.

This is precisely why many Filipinos no longer see the Senate as the dignified “temple of laws” it once prided itself on being. They see a chamber increasingly consumed by political survival, factional loyalties, and dynastic warfare ahead of the looming impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte.

The sudden rise of Alan Peter Cayetano to the Senate presidency — aided by the dramatic reappearance of fugitive-suspect senator Ronald dela Rosa — only deepened public suspicion that the chamber is being reorganized not for governance, but for protection.

Protection of allies. Protection of political futures. Protection from accountability.

And perhaps the deepest loss in all of this is something older Filipinos once valued instinctively in public life: delicadeza.

There was a time when that word carried moral force. A single invocation of delicadeza was enough to compel resignation, silence arrogance, or remind officials that public office required humility and restraint. Leaders once understood that institutions survive not merely because laws exist, but because shame still exists.

Today, delicadeza feels almost extinct.

Instead, the public sees senators crying before cameras, allies shielding one another from warrants, security forces confronting law enforcers inside Senate halls, and elected officials behaving less like statesmen and more like participants in a political escape drama.

And this is the very same Senate now asking Filipinos to trust it as an impartial impeachment court.

That may be the greatest institutional crisis of all: not simply that the Senate has lost control of itself, but that it may already be losing the moral authority to judge anyone at all.

*         *         *

SHORT BURSTS. For comments or reactions, email firingline@ymail.com or tweet @Side_View via X app (formerly Twitter). Read current and past issues of this column at https://www.thenationweek.com