SENATE President Vicente Sotto III on Friday said he will support moves in Congress to amend the Constitution through Charter change, or Cha-cha, to prevent the judiciary from intervening in future impeachment cases.
Sotto made mention of Charter change in reaction to the Supreme Court’s affirmation on Thursday that the impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte is unconstitutional.
The court has denied the House of Representatives’ motion to reconsider the impeachment case it filed against Duterte.
Sotto said in a Zoom interview the ruling altered the impeachment provisions outlined in the Constitution.
“The Constitution had just been amended unconstitutionally through Supreme Court overreach,” he said, calling the ruling “judicial legislation.”
“Impeachment is now an impossible dream,” Sotto said.
He highlighted what he called errors in the court’s factual assumptions, pointing out that the Senate did not archive the impeachment case on Feb. 5, 2025, as stated in the decision, but only in June of that year, when Congress adjourned sine die.
Sotto said the misdating undercuts the basis for how the one-year bar was applied.
He questioned why there was no dissenting opinion, given the profound implications of the ruling.
“If this is what the Supreme Court is doing, it would be better to change the Constitution,” Sotto said.
He said he plans to meet with House leaders next week to discuss possible congressional action.
He maintained that when the Supreme Court sets rules governing impeachment, it encroaches on powers that the Constitution delegates solely to Congress, particularly the House’s exclusive authority to initiate impeachment proceedings and the Senate’s role as impeachment court.
Voting 19-4-1 last August, the Senate ruled to archive the articles of impeachment against the vice president, following a Supreme Court ruling that declared the complaint unconstitutional.
Malacañang on Friday said President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. respects the Supreme Court ruling upholding Duterte’s impeachment, but stressed that it did not clear her of any wrongdoing.
“As we can read in the Supreme Court decision, its subject matter is not about absolving an issue. So, as the President said, if there’s accountability, those persons should be made accountable,” Palace Press Officer Claire Castro said.
Castro added that Marcos would not interfere if a new impeachment complaint is filed against Duterte.
The president himself is facing impeachment complaints before the House.
“Whatever happens regarding impeachment, that is within the jurisdiction of Congress, and if anyone should file such a case, our President will not meddle,” Castro said.
The opposition-led August Twenty One Movement (ATOM) questioned the constitutionality of the Supreme Court’s decision to reaffirm its decision to void the impeachment complaint against Duterte.
In a statement on Friday, the group, known for its involvement in the 1986 EDSA People Power Revolution, said that the constitutional provision on impeachment was supposed to protect Filipinos from abusive leaders.
“Forty years later, with the failure to jail the Marcoses and any of their cronies, we saw the rise of a new dictator wannabe ten years ago, named [Rodrigo] Duterte, with the intent of copying [Ferdinand] Marcos Sr. We eventually saw the return of the son of the dictator and the daughter of the ‘dictator wannabe’ taking power as President and Vice President, respectively. A farce team-up called UniTeam combined their forces and brought them to power together. We have been in the upside-down world since,” ATOM said.
“We are now approaching another unprecedented moment in our history where impeachments against the President and the Vice President are filed in one year. That says something about these two leaders; whether we like it or not, we have to admit that both leaders are problematic,” it said.
“We will continue to remain wary of any group that will file impeachments to trigger the one-year ban on filing impeachments meant to sabotage, through technicality, the very process meant to protect the people,” the group said.
Several lawmakers believe that the Supreme Court’s ruling had crossed from “interpretation to legislation,” noting that the House not only reviewed its compliance with clear constitutional commands — it has rewritten the operating manual for impeachment initiation.
“It is judicial legislation — well-intentioned perhaps, but constitutionally infirm — because it straightjackets a co-equal branch through judicial overreach. It has supplied new rules, new timelines and new consequences that are nowhere found in the text,” Mamamayang Liberal Party-list Rep. Leila de Lima said.
De Lima said the resolution appears to be a derogation of the House’s constitutional powers and prerogatives..
“As the latest SC (Supreme Court) ruling closes several doctrinal loopholes in its original decision, the Court also took the opportunity presented by the Motion for Reconsideration to restructure, refurbish and refine novel doctrinal pronouncements via an addendum to the original ponencia,” she said.
Manila 3rd District Rep. Joel Chua said the high court ruling laid out a “complicated web of restrictions and convoluted chains that almost makes it impossible to use the impeachment process to exact accountability against the impeachable officers.”
“We will not speculate as to what they think they saw. They were not direct. That is why their decision ran 50 pages long. The result was this Supreme Court decision that gave Congress a new multilayered straitjacket,” Chua said.
The Makabayan bloc in the House said the ruling has set a “dangerous precedent” that would favor powerful officials over accountability.
“The danger in the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Duterte impeachment is that it appears to be changing the rules on impeachment as the process unfolds. This constitutes judicial overreach and sets a bad precedent where judicial intervention occurs every time a complaint is filed against an impeachable official,” the bloc, composed of ACT Teachers Party-list Rep. Antonio Tinio, Gabriela Rep. Sarah Elago and Kabataan Party-list Rep. Renee Co, said.
They called on the Supreme Court to “refrain from further judicial overreach that undermines constitutional mechanisms for accountability.”
During a forum in Cebu City on Wednesday, former congressman Mike Defensor said impeachment has become the only constitutional way to hold a sitting president accountable, since criminal or administrative cases cannot be filed while the president is in office.
Defensor said the impeachment push reflects the collapse of the “unity” narrative from the 2022 elections and early tensions between Marcos and Duterte.
He said the impeachment complaints rest on constitutional grounds, including graft and corruption, bribery, culpable violation of the Constitution, betrayal of public trust and other high crimes.
Duterte has thanked her legal team and her supporters following the Supreme Court decision.
“I thank God first, then my lawyers who questioned the abuse in the process of impeachment of the House of Representatives, and third to every Filipino who continue to trust me,” Duterte said in an interview with her supporters at The Hague in the Netherlands, where she visited her jailed father, former president Rodrigo Duterte.
He did not mention her impeachment case to her father and instead opted to discuss other matters that related to her life and the country rather than the impeachment trial.