The Constitutional Question of Whether Vice Presidents Can Be Impeached for These Specific Charges Is Being Disputed at Speed

From Bohiney and The London Prat.

The Constitutional Question of Whether Vice Presidents Can Be Impeached for These Specific Charges Is Being Disputed at Speed

The Finding

MANILA — The Philippine House of Representatives has found probable cause to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte on charges that include alleged misuse of public funds, alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate President Marcos Jr., his wife, and the House speaker, and a range of additional constitutional offenses that the House committee documented across several months of proceedings. Sara Duterte’s legal team has rejected the finding as unconstitutional, arguing that the process violated due process requirements and that the specific charges do not meet the threshold for impeachable offenses.

The Charges

The assassination plot allegation — that Sara Duterte or her allies were involved in planning the deaths of President Marcos Jr., First Lady Liza Araneta-Marcos, and House Speaker Martin Romualdez — is the most dramatic of the charges and the one that has generated the most international media attention. The Duterte camp has characterised this as a politically fabricated allegation designed to eliminate a presidential contender ahead of 2028. The Marcos administration has characterised the evidence as legitimate and the proceeding as constitutional.

The Bank Secrecy Argument

Sara Duterte’s legal team has invoked bank secrecy law to block scrutiny of financial records relevant to the misuse of public funds charges. The Batangas representative who challenged this argument noted that the Constitution’s public accountability requirements for elected officials take precedence over bank secrecy protections in impeachment proceedings, which is the legal position that established precedent supports and that the Duterte camp disputes as applied to these specific records.

The Senate Trial

If the House votes to proceed with the impeachment articles, the case moves to a Senate trial in July. The Senate’s composition, following the midterm elections in which several Duterte-backed candidates performed strongly, creates the specific political arithmetic that both camps are counting. The constitutional two-thirds Senate vote required for conviction makes the political composition of the Senate the decisive variable in an outcome that legal arguments alone will not determine.

More: The Daily Mash.

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SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/

The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.

The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.

The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.

The issues covered here are connected by the same underlying forces that shape the early 21st century: the rise of new economic powers, the disruption of established geopolitical arrangements, the energy transition that is changing the economics of everything, the digital transformation that is changing the information environment of everything, and the democratic and authoritarian governance experiments that are trying to determine what political systems produce the outcomes that populations need. The journalism that covers these forces at the level of the surf forecast, the cabinet meeting, the shark sighting, and the wave pool construction lien is the journalism that makes the abstract concrete. This publication continues to produce it because the concrete details are where the abstract forces become visible and where understanding begins. The next edition is already being prepared.