In a multi-party democracy like ours, the math of governance is never simple. In the House of Representatives, more than 300 legislators bring with them different parties, loyalties, regions, advocacies—and, inevitably, different ambitions. Majorities can be built, yes, but they can also be brittle: loud on opening day, fractured by the next crisis.

That is why the passing of former House Speaker Jose “Joe” de Venecia Jr.—“JDV” to colleagues and “Manong Joe” to many who learned politics at his elbow—feels like the closing of a chapter. He died on Feb. 10 at 89. And with him goes a style of leadership that believed consensus was not a slogan but a discipline.

Speaker JDV’s record is easy to recite and hard to match: seven terms as a congressman, and five terms as Speaker—an unprecedented run in the postwar Congress. But numbers alone don’t explain why he mattered. What made JDV “Speaker Joe” was his instinct for coalition as a form of nation-building.

The Senate captured this best when it honored him in 2024, recalling how he organized the “Rainbow Coalition,” a broad alliance that helped promote unity and stability during the turbulent post–Martial Law years. The phrase can sound quaint today—rainbows and coalitions, as if politics were merely about colors and seating arrangements. Yet in that difficult era, stabilizing the House meant stabilizing the country: ensuring budgets passed, reforms moved, and democratic institutions gained muscle instead of merely rhetoric.

Under his stewardship, more than 200 economic, political, and social reform laws were passed during the Fidel V. Ramos administration, laying groundwork that would shape the country’s economic direction for years. You didn’t always have to agree with JDV to recognize the craft: He understood that legislation is rarely the triumph of one perfect idea, but the patient weaving together of enough “yes” votes to make progress real.

And he did not build coalitions in the abstract. He built them around concrete measures that touched ordinary lives—even when the impact was not immediately visible.

Take the Dollar Remittance Program for overseas Filipino workers, which the Senate noted he conceived as early as 1967, and which today generates more than $30 billion annually for the Philippines. Long before “OFW” became a familiar shorthand in every household, JDV already treated migrant workers’ sacrifices as a national lifeline that deserved an institutional channel, not just sentimental applause.

In the same long list are laws that helped rewire how the country invests and grows: the Build-Operate-Transfer framework, bases conversion, economic zones, and the New Central Bank Act—policies that reshaped infrastructure building, redirected former military lands toward development, and strengthened monetary institutions. The point is not to argue that every law was flawless; no era produces perfect policy. The point is that he aimed his political capital at the architecture of the state, not merely the theater of politics.

JDV’s statesmanship also carried a diplomatic texture that many domestic politicians never acquire. The Senate resolution recalled his service as Minister and Economic and Press Counselor in Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) during the Vietnam War. It’s the kind of formative assignment that teaches you a quiet truth: conflicts can look “far away” until they suddenly rearrange your own region’s future.

That may help explain why he was, by reputation and by repeated effort, a peacemaker—mediating with Muslim secessionists, rightist military officers, and communist insurgents in pursuit of agreements and amnesty programs. He also helped push an Interfaith Dialogue initiative at the United Nations, an attempt to treat politico-religious conflict as something to be managed by conversation before it becomes tragedy.

Even after his peak years in the House, he continued to think in regional terms—Asia as a community that needed more venues for conversation and cooperation. The Senate cited his role in founding or chairing organizations such as the International Conference of Asian Political Parties (ICAPP), the Asian Parliamentary Assembly (APA), and the Asian Peace and Reconciliation Council (APRC), among others. And in 2017, he was appointed as Special Envoy for intercultural dialogue, and also served as Special Envoy to APEC.

But if you ask those who worked with him what they will miss most, you will hear less about titles and more about temperament: the sense that he could be firm without being petty, ambitious without being small. In the tributes after his death, even political opponents remembered his magnanimity—how he made room for minorities, how he mentored younger lawmakers, how he treated institution-building as an ethical obligation, not a procedural nuisance.

This, perhaps, is the most important lesson of Speaker Joe De Venecia: Statesmanship is not a costume you wear on ceremonial days. It is the daily, unglamorous habit of choosing dialogue over division, policy over posturing, and country over clique—especially when doing so is inconvenient.

In our time, when politics often rewards the sharpest sound bite and the fastest outrage, remembering JDV as a respectable figure is not about nostalgia. It is a challenge. It asks today’s leaders: Can you still build a “rainbow” in a nation that profits from permanent thunderclouds?