Congress and congressmen have been in the news lately. We have the 188 representatives who signed the impeachment complaint against Chief Justice Renato Corona. Then those in the minority will decide whether to keep Edcel Lagman as their leader or replace him with Danilo Suarez.
That Congress is a numbers game goes all the way back in history to our Founding Fathers in the Malolos Congress. According to revolutionary Gen. Jose Alejandrino, in his memoirs “La Senda del Sacrificio” (translated from the original Spanish as “The Price of Freedom”), we owe the present separation of Church and State to Antonio Luna who played the numbers game too. Alejandrino wrote:
“[General] Antonio Luna also became a member of Congress. There he affiliated himself with the faction that we can call ‘Radical.’ This faction was formed almost spontaneously when the celebrated debates started in Congress over: the separation of the Church and the State; the expulsion of the [Spanish] friars and other religious congregations from the Philippines; and the prohibition by the Constitution of the formation of new religious orders.
“The debates showed signs of dragging on forever because, although it appears strange, considering the motives that started the [Philippine] Revolution, one half of the members of the Congress were adherents of the friars. Eloquent speeches from each group were made but there never was a voting because both groups were afraid of the result of the balloting. Luna broke the situation with one of those tricks peculiar to his character and which made him famous later.
“He assembled all those delegates of the Radical faction who had confidence in him and advised them to keep away from the sessions of the Congress but requesting them to remain within call at a moment’s notice. With the Radicals absent, the Conservatives constituted a majority during the sessions. Having made a careful counting and thinking themselves sure of victory, the Conservatives moved for a vote, while the few Radicals present registered a token opposition. The motion to call a vote was carried. Then, at the precise moment of balloting, Luna immediately called all his adherents to enter the session hall en masse to the surprise of the [over]confident Conservatives. The voting was taken and we won, if I remember right, by one or two votes. In this manner the provision in our Constitution for the separation of the Church and the State was secured.”
It’s a pity that the Malolos Congress was not covered by television like today because the above event would make exciting viewing.
Remember the rowdy impeachment complaint against then President Joseph Estrada? Then we had the recent one against Chief Justice Renato Corona that some representatives signed without reading the articles of impeachment. One can only hope that the Congressional and Senate Libraries and their Archives keep all records and transcripts for easy retrieval by historians of the future who will study our times in a more detached and, hopefully, objective manner.
For the Malolos Congress, the standard work is a 1972 compilation by Sulpicio Guevara, entitled “The Laws of the First Philippine Republic: The Laws of Malolos 1898-1899.” More materials have come out of the woodwork since then, and we need a second look at these laws from the perspective of a historian and a lawyer so we can see how the Founding Fathers made sense of their world, and whether we have progressed since their times.
Antonio Luna is one of the tragic but lesser known of our heroes. We all know of his assassination at the hands of Presidential Guards from Cavite whom he had disarmed and reprimanded earlier. We read about the many wounds inflicted on him by gun and bolo, of his famous last cuss words as he lay dying in the plaza of Cabanatuan in 1899 and how an old woman, allegedly Emilio Aguinaldo’s mother, looked out of the window and asked, “Nagalaw pa baiyan?”(Is he still alive)?
Luna was a fascinating character, a man of many talents wearing different hats. He was a good swordsman and reputedly one of the best guitarists of his time. He was a journalist, a writer, a scientist trained in the Institut Pasteur in Paris who did early studies on the purity of carabao milk, the quality of water in the Pasig River, and the spread of malaria. He is considered one of our heroes but according to Teodoro A. Agoncillo, he was the greatest general of the Filipino-American War who did not win a single battle!
Aside from Rizal, Antonio Luna and Apolinario Mabini are my favorite Filipino heroes, and I believe they deserve a second look. Both are covered by standard biographies—Luna by Vivencio Jose and Mabini by Cesar Adib Majul—but it will not hurt to hit the libraries and archives again in the hope that fresh material will result in new insights that will help us further understand our past.
Now that Rizal’s sesquicentennial is done, we can look forward to more 150th birthdays: Andres Bonifacio’s in 2013, Apolinario Mabini’s in 2014, Antonio Luna’s in 2016, and Emilio Aguinaldo’s in 2019. Much work is waiting to be undertaken by younger historians.
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