Upper chamber Tragicomedy
With the Cayetano-led majority firmly in Duterte’s corner, the prospect of a fair and meaningful trial has dimmed considerably.
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With the Cayetano-led majority firmly in Duterte’s corner, the prospect of a fair and meaningful trial has dimmed considerably.
What unfolded inside the Philippine Senate on the afternoon of Monday, 11 May 2026, would have strained credulity even in a telenovela.
Senator Ronald “Bato” dela Rosa, after months of conspicuous absence, materialized just in time to cast the decisive vote in a coup against Senate President Tito Sotto — but not before having to outrun agents of the National Bureau of Investigation who were chasing him through the Senate building to serve an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court.
CCTV cameras captured the senator darting from the parking lot, taking the fire exit stairs, stumbling mid-flight and bursting into the plenary hall, visibly winded and nursing an injured hand.
The scene was, by any measure, simultaneously farcical and deeply alarming — a sitting senator of the Republic fleeing pursuing law enforcement on the very grounds of the institution he was elected to serve.
Dela Rosa had largely disappeared from public view since November 2025, after reports emerged that the ICC had issued an arrest warrant against him in connection with his role as Philippine National Police chief and alleged architect of Rodrigo Duterte’s drug war, which led to the extrajudicial killing of thousands of Filipinos.
The new Senate leadership under Alan Peter Cayetano ordered a probe, released CCTV footage and cited in contempt several individuals involved in the incident — not the senator evading arrest but the agents attempting to enforce an international court order.
Dela Rosa was subsequently placed under Senate protective custody, with Cayetano declaring that he would enjoy “the protection of the law and the protection of the Senate.” In a breathtaking inversion of legal logic, the Senate complex was locked down — not to detain a man wanted by the ICC, but to trap the agents who sought to bring him to justice.
The timing was, of course, no coincidence. Allies of Vice President Sara Duterte grabbed power in the Senate on the same day the House of Representatives voted to impeach her a second time — and the choreography of both events suggested the Senate leadership coup and Dela Rosa’s dramatic reappearance were coordinated acts in a broader plot to insulate Duterte from accountability.
The House voted 257 to 25 to send Sara Duterte to the Senate for a trial on charges of plundering public funds and plotting the killing of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta Marcos and former House Speaker Martin Romualdez. The landslide vote far exceeded even the most optimistic forecasts.
Duterte and her legal team had snubbed all the House hearings, offering only general denials through press conferences and official statements.
The calculus in the Senate, however, points toward an acquittal. Duterte would need only nine senators to vote against conviction to survive, way short of the 16 required for her removal under the Constitution.
With the Cayetano-led majority firmly in Duterte’s corner, the prospect of a fair and meaningful trial has dimmed considerably. The Senate, constitutionally mandated to convene as an impeachment court, may well become the graveyard of the very accountability it is duty-bound to dispense.
This is the gravest consequence of Monday’s theater. Survey after survey has shown that the Filipino people want the Vice President to face trial and answer the serious allegations against her — corruption, misuse of public funds and threats against the lives of the nation’s highest officials.
Should the new Senate majority engineer procedural delays, dismissals, or an acquittal untethered from the evidence, the message to ordinary Filipinos would be corrosive: that the law shields the powerful, only the powerless are held accountable and the Republic’s guardians can be hijacked to serve the very interests they were built to restrain.
Democracies are not undone in a single moment. They are hollowed out — vote by vote, precedent by precedent and, sometimes, stairway by stairway.
