THIS is the checkmate that no camp will want to acknowledge. The moment multiple impeachment complaints are placed on the table against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. and Vice President Sara Duterte, the entire exercise will begin to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. What is framed as an expansion of accountability will instead expose a fatal inconsistency in standards, one that threatens to turn impeachment from a constitutional mechanism into partisan farce. Rather than clarifying responsibility, the proliferation of complaints will muddy the very rules meant to govern accountability. The public will be left watching not a legal process unfold, but a strategic standoff where one case becomes the defense of the other.
At the heart of this problem will not be the number of complaints, but the logic that underpins them. Any defense invoked for the vice president, such as good faith, lack of direct participation, absence of intent or claims of partisan motivation, will not remain confined to her case. These are not personal privileges. They are constitutional doctrines. Once asserted, they will rebound with full force when a different and harsher standard is applied to the president. Legal standards, once invoked, cannot be selectively suspended without collapsing their normative authority. The Constitution does not recognize partisan carve-outs. Consistency is not optional in constitutional adjudication; it is the minimum requirement for legitimacy.
The timing now matters. The Supreme Court has already denied the motion for reconsideration filed by the House of Representatives in relation to the unconstitutionality of the impeachment complaint against Duterte. This denial clears the way for the filing of a new complaint. By Feb. 6, a fresh impeachment complaint against her can now be filed. The militant left has already signaled that it will do so, and it is expected that the same group of representatives from the Makabayan bloc will once again endorse the complaint.
This is not a minor detail. This is the same bloc that filed the second impeachment complaint against Marcos. Their strategy, therefore, will place two impeachment complaints on the table, anchored on overlapping but inconsistently applied theories of liability. What they may believe will intensify accountability will instead expose its internal contradictions.
You cannot demand proof of personal culpability, intent and direct participation to shield one official, then casually dispense with all three when prosecuting another, without admitting that impeachment has been reduced to a political hit job. Constitutional accountability does not operate on alternating standards. Either evidence, intent and participation will matter, or they will not. The Constitution will not permit a sliding scale calibrated to political convenience.
And the logic will cut both ways. One cannot invoke good faith and lack of intent to defend one but deny the same to the other. Pro-Duterte senators cannot impute guilt by command responsibility to the president but acquit the vice president by ignoring her command responsibility over her subordinates. The moment standards diverge, impeachment will cease to be a legal process and will become an exercise in selective outrage. At that point, outcomes will be driven less by constitutional judgment than by political alignment.
This is where the strategy of the militant left, endorsed by the Makabayan bloc, will begin to unravel. In their zeal to impeach the two highest officials of the land, they may engineer the precise conditions for failure for both complaints. By proceeding against both, they will not strengthen accountability. They will neutralize it. Worse, they will create a condition in the Senate that enables dismissal for both rather than a guilty verdict for the more deserving. What might have been two distinct inquiries will collapse into a single problem of inconsistent theory. The Senate, confronted with doctrinal incoherence, will be institutionally pushed toward rejection as the most defensible course.
What the militant Left will have produced is a constitutional checkmate. Pro-Duterte senators may already possess the numbers to block an impeachment of the vice president. But those same senators who may want to convict the president will not be able to credibly do so without fatally undermining the very legal defenses they rely on to protect Duterte. To do so would require them to abandon doctrines of intent, participation and good faith, doctrines they will insist are indispensable when Duterte is on the dock.
In effect, standards deployed as shields in one case will become barriers in the other. What was meant to be pressure on power will become a trap for its own architects. The result will be political paralysis by design. Two complaints will be placed before the Senate, each exposing the inconsistencies of the other. The Senate will then be handed a perfect exit: dismiss both, invoke doctrinal consistency, and move on.
This is not a defense of any particular official. It is an indictment of a strategy that mistakes volume for validity and spectacle for substance. Impeachment is not a protest rally, nor is it a substitute for armed rebellion. It is a constitutional process governed by standards precisely because it wields extraordinary power.
Those standards exist to prevent impeachment from becoming an alternative to a failed rebellion. They demand proof, coherence and consistency. When accusers abandon these requirements in the rush to indict, they will have stripped impeachment of legitimacy.
Once impeachment is reduced to a one-two punch spectacle designed to take down the two highest officials of the land, one will provide the defense for another, not because the Senate will have failed its constitutional duty, but because the accusers have failed to think. They will transform a grave legal mechanism into a performative exercise and will be undone by the very doctrines they sought to weaponize. The lesson will be harsh but unavoidable: Constitutional tools cannot survive sustained abuse.
Impeachment was never meant to be easy. It was designed to be exacting, disciplined and principled. Those who forget this will not strengthen democracy. They will weaken it by turning its most serious process into an alternative to a failed armed struggle to decapitate the state, where they will likewise fail.
Disclosure: The author is a professor at the University of the Philippines Los Baños and vice chairman of the board of the state-run PTV Network Inc.
