By Diego Morra
Senior Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, the ponente of the assailed 97-page Sara Duterte vs House of Representatives ruling, may have implicitly admitted that something doesn’t add up in his written treatise, saying that if anyone bothers to look closely, the Supreme Court (SC) justices are not gods.
Indeed, as retired Senior Associate Justice Antonio Carpio said, the SC got it all wrong, arguing in an interview that its factual basis was “totally incorrect.” Worse, Carpio explained that the factual basis relied on a media report instead of the official records of the House of Representatives in concluding that the articles of impeachment were invalid. The grounds of the SC in voiding the articles of impeachment were primarily that there was no approval by the plenary. They said the articles were transmitted to the Senate even without a plenary vote. And that’s why the SC in their decision quoted an ABS-CBN report that there was no vote. But if you look at the records of the House, they voted actually.”
There go the judicial gods at the Mt. Olympus in Padre Faura misappreciating the facts, eviscerating the truth and rendering injustice in full splendor. Thus, the uproar, the criticisms not only from lawmakers but also lawyers, journalists, commentators and the public at large, with some surveys showing that more than 80% of Filipinos want the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Zimmerman Duterte Carpio to commence forthwith, despite Senate President Chiz Escudero’s wayward definition of that English monolexeme. If the plenary approved the articles, then, like Golem, Leonen’s first ground would be doomed by liquefaction. In short, the judicial leg will sink and the decent reaction of the High Tribunal would be to revisit its 13-0 decision and reverse it. Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus.
Yet, the bombardment of the Leonen ponencia will not stop, even if the Integrated Bar of the Philippines (IBP) calls for the House of Representatives to respect it. One flawed command that the SC issued to the House leadership was to provide the respondent, in this case Sara, with the full set of allegations and for her to respond, arguing that due process demands the same. This is a strange, like other Leonen requirements, that permits the High Tribunal to craft rules of impeachment that are the province of the Lower House. This is not only an overreach but an interference in the functions of a co-equal branch of the government. On August 1, 2025, the faculty members of the University of the Philippines College of Law issued a five-page statement signed by 85 professors, justices and prominent lawyers (as of 10:30 a.m. on August 1) that questioned the SC decision, pointing out the basic errors that the tribunal must remedy.
“We have carefully studied the Supreme Court’s decision in Duterte v. House of Representatives and the unprecedented actions that have been taken by Congress that have led us to this point. We acknowledge the anxiety, confusion, and fears of a constitutional crisis that have arisen among the general public… informed by the law and the constitutional and political history that we teach and study, we stand by bedrock principles of our constitutional system and warn that these recent developments undermine impeachment as an indispensable instrument of political accountability for our highest public officials,” the statement read. Quoting the SC itself, the statement stressed that for nearly 100 years, impeachment in the Philippines has existed as a mechanism of political accountability and the process as “purely political.” Unlike legal accountability via criminal prosecutions for corruption, impeachment doesn’t depend on standards of evidence, proof of elements, and judicial impartiality to function.
Impeachments are decided only upon the simple question of whether a high public official should continue to be entrusted with public office. Its consequence is not prison time or civil damages but removal. Impeachment decisions are products of political and moral judgment, not strict legal analysis. The statement added that the “correctness of those decisions is not ordinarily reviewed by a higher court for errors of law and fact, but by the sovereign Filipino people via the ballot box. This is precisely why the Court had deferred to Congress in defining its impeachment processes, subject only to the Constitution’s limited text: its members, as our elected representatives, are directly answerable to the people. The Constitution made it clear that the House has the “exclusive power to initiate,” and the Senate the “sole power to try and decide,” “all cases of impeachment.” The UP professors backed the view of the Free Legal Assistance Group (FLAG) that the over-judicialization of the process—by laying out evidentiary and court-like procedures for Congress, even at the early point of initiation—will permanently change impeachment’s nature.
“While judicial review exists even for acts as discretionary as impeachment, it is constitutionally available only when there is grave abuse. We believe that Congress simply relied on the rule set by the Court in Francisco v. House of Representatives and Gutierrez v. Committee on Justice that initiation by the House consists of the filing of a complaint and its referral to the proper committee. This could not be an abuse of discretion, much less a grave one. If the Court intended to lay out new rules for the House, then the “reliance of the public thereto prior to their being declared unconstitutional” calls for at least a prospective application of its decision and not the nullification of the House’s actions,” the statement added. “Whenever it had to intervene in past impeachments, the Court did so cautiously to avoid not only preempting Congress but also influencing the only process of political accountability for its own members. The Court had therefore avoided defining impeachable offenses because it acknowledged each as a “nonjusticiable political question which is beyond the scope of its judicial power.”
The Duterte ruling has consequences that the parties themselves did not appear to contemplate, the statement argued. For instance, the House must now meet as a chamber even if one-third of all its members have already signed and verified a resolution of impeachment. “We agree with Justice Adolfo Azcuna’s view that this is contrary to the intent to make impeachments easier to initiate. We add that it deviates from the design to protect the process from a tyrannical majority, which in plenary now has the power to block resolutions for impeachment. As our colleagues have also noted, the ruling creates an incentive for the filing of sham complaints to trigger the one-year bar rule—a political strategy once criticized by a justice as making ‘a mockery of the power of impeachment.’ Narrower rulings in the past have precisely avoided these unintended consequences,” the UP College of Law faculty concluded.
