SC latest ruling: Bad news for Duterte’s impeachment battle

Vice President Sara Duterte suffered a defeat at the Supreme Court (SC) filled by appointees of her father, former president Rodrigo Duterte. Via a unanimous decision on Wednesday, August 5, the High Court junked the two petitions — including the one filed by the Vice President herself — questioning her impeachment proceedings. The petition questioned the validity of the hearings on the impeachment complaints conducted by the House committee on justice. In other words, the Vice President was challenging the early stages of her impeachment proceedings that are currently in full-blown trial at the Senate impeachment court. Should the petitions have been granted, they might have had an adverse effect on the ongoing trial. The SC dismissed the consolidated petitions GR No. E-05546 (filed by lawyer Israelito Torreon, et al.) and GR No. E-05667 (filed by Duterte) for being moot, or no longer being in need of resolution. It explained that this was so because the House already approved and transmitted the articles of impeachment to the Senate. The impeachment articles — in this case, four — refer to the list of impeachable allegations against Duterte. They include Duterte’s alleged misuse of her confidential funds and threats to President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and his family. By constitutional design, it’s the House of Representatives that has the mandate to assess if an impeachment complaint against an impeachable official is substantial. The House committee on justice is supposed to hold hearings, and the House plenary could later decide whether or not to approve the articles of impeachment. On May 11, a total of 257 lawmakers voted to approve the articles, impeaching Duterte for a second time. After the approval, the articles are now with the Senate which is in the middle of the impeachment trial. At the trial’s end, the senator-judges will vote to either convict or acquit Duterte. If convicted, the Vice President will be removed from her position and will be barred from holding government office perpetually. She can no longer run for president in 2028. In its briefer, the SC explained that the House’s transmittal of the articles marked the end of the lower chamber’s role in the impeachment process, and the initiation of an impeachment case. The actions Duterte and Torreon wanted to stop had already been completed, said the High Court. “The SC further held that the impeachment process had already moved to the Senate, which had convened as an impeachment court and had begun proceedings…. Any ruling on the validity of the actions taken by the House and its Committee on Justice would no longer affect the controversy,” said the High Court. Settle the debate? Duterte’s 2025 impeachment was stopped by an SC decision that found that the articles of impeachment were unconstitutional, therefore voiding them, and stopping the trial at the Senate before it could even go full-blown. The decision penned by Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen said the 2025 impeachment proceedings violated Duterte’s right to due process and the one-year bar rule. This rule prohibits the initiation of more than one impeachment proceeding against an impeachable official within a year. For 2026, Duterte wanted to replicate the same feat. She argued before the SC that the 2026 impeachment complaints violated the one-year bar rule and that their referral was invalid. The Vice President also questioned the public hearing held by the committee on justice which evaluated the evidence and witnesses against her. Some called the committee hearings a “mini-trial,” but Duterte called it a “fishing expedition.” University of the Philippines College of Law associate dean and constitutional law professor Paolo Tamase explained that a fishing expedition means that a party is using an existing legal proceeding to dig deeper into another offense. Its purpose is to look for things against a person using evidence that can be found only through another legal proceeding, he added. For the House prosecution, the latest SC ruling settled the debate on this so-called fishing expedition. “This means that all the talks about the mini-trial fishing expedition that we saw earlier, repeated by the defense, are now coming to an end. This means that the launch of the fight is no longer at the Supreme Court, but here in the Senate Impeachment Court. And we have high confidence that at the end of this process, the truth will prevail,” House prosecutor Terry Ridon said in Filipino. “They’re questioning the proceedings at the House, including the decision to transmit to the Senate. And therefore, they hope that if the House is junked, this process will also be junked. That will not happen because the petition has already been trashed,” he added. Senate: Independent, jurisdiction absolute The Senate impeachment court, speaking through its spokesperson Reginald Tongol, said the SC ruling confirmed that the job of the House in initiating the impeachment had already been accomplished. According to Tongol, the ruling also affirmed that the Senate, as the impeachment court, has exclusive jurisdiction over the impeachment trial as stated in Article XI, Section 3(6) of the 1987 Constitution. “Like what’s stated in the Supreme Court resolution, the transmittal of the articles of impeachment activated the Senate’s power to convene into an impeachment court. The jurisdiction of the Impeachment Court is now absolute,” the spokesperson said in Filipino. Tongol explained that the Senate was never a party to the SC petitions and is operating “entirely distinct” from the House prosecutors. That being said, the spokesperson said that the procedural history, evidentiary gathering, as well as the House’s internal findings prior to the transmittal of the articles are within the House’s jurisdiction. “The Impeachment Court does not inherit their legal disputes, nor will the Court litigate them in the adjudicatory phase of the process,” Tongol said. “Because the impeachment court is fully insulated from whatever happened at the House of Representatives, the impeachment court begins with a blank slate in this adjudicatory phase,” he added. This exclusive jurisdiction of the Senate could have been put to a test if the SC ruled the other way. When the SC decided that the 2025 impeachment against Duterte was unconstitutional, the Senate archived the articles of impeachment. But that was a different instance — a full-blown trial had yet to commence at the time. “Had the petitions been granted, the trial could have been put in doubt and a constitutional stand-off created. The Senate is quite protective of its prerogatives in impeachment, and unlike last year, this trial is well under way. So as in the last time the Supreme Court stopped an active trial (2011-2012), the Senate would have taken a vote,” Tamase told Rappler. As of writing, there is a pending third petition against the proceedings of the House committee on justice, filed on April 20 by lawyer Hue Jyro Go and companions. The SC has yet to act on this, but it’s likely that this will be declared moot too, given the ruling in the first two petitions. Meanwhile, impeachment court presiding officer Chiz Escudero’s position is still under question at the SC after Torreon and companions filed a petition on July 7 with the High Court. But for Tamase, this legal question should not affect the trial and its validity. “The power to try is vested by the Constitution on the Senate, not the presiding officer or any single officer. The presiding officer’s rulings are impliedly supported by the rest of the Senate — otherwise they would have called a vote and overturned the call. So any defect in his election by his colleagues will not change the legal bottomline that the Senate is running the show, according to and aided by its own rules,” the UP law associate dean explained. – Rappler.com