Following the Supreme Court decision declaring the impeachment process unconstitutional, the argument posited is that the Senate impeachment court has not been constituted.
Thus, the argument seeking the convening of the body should stop.
According to the SC, the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte violated the one-year bar rule under Article XI, Section 3(5) of the 1987 Constitution, prohibiting more than one impeachment proceeding against the same official within a year.
The House of Representatives’ handling of the four impeachment complaints — in which three were archived without action and the fourth was transmitted to the Senate — violated the constitutional safeguard against the process being manipulated for political vendetta, according to the High Tribunal.
The impeachment court can only exist as a result of a constitutionally valid Articles of Impeachment from the House.
Since the Supreme Court declared the transmitted articles unconstitutional due to the violation of the one-year bar rule and the violation of due process of the accused, the impeachment court had ceased to exist.
The question over the infirmity of the proceedings was reinforced by the Senate’s action in June 2025, when it remanded the impeachment articles to the House due to constitutional questions.
The SC’s decision underlines the intent to prevent the impeachment process from being used as a tool for political vendetta, which was the experience in the past.
The late SC Chief Justice Renato Corona was a victim of such partisan action, which until now constitutes the worst instance of persecution against a constitutional official.
The one-year bar rule is a safeguard to ensure that impeachable officials, such as the Vice President, are not subjected to repeated or politically motivated attacks.
The ultimate objective of the Tribunal was to ensure procedural fairness, regardless of the political motivations behind the complaints.
Claims of overreach have no basis, as the Court asserted its authority to review legal issues in impeachment proceedings, contrary to critics’ claims that such matters are purely political questions beyond judicial scrutiny.
Article VIII, Section 1 of the 1987 Constitution grants the judiciary the power to determine whether there has been a “grave abuse of discretion” by any branch of government.
The SC’s intervention ensured that the impeachment process adhered to constitutional standards, preventing its misuse as a political tool.
Therefore, the impeachment court effectively does not exist, and calls to convene it are without merit.
The assertion that the impeachment court can ignore the SC decision is not even defensible.
According to the SC decision, the impeachment process is void ab initio, which means that, in practical terms, the House wasted a substantial legislative period in the 19th Congress to ram through an infirm procedure.
The SC ruling provided a remedy for the total disaster of a procedure that required filing a new complaint with the accusers, ensuring they follow Constitutional requirements a year after the reckoned trigger of the first filing.
That, to cut the chase short, would be not earlier than February next year.