VP Sara asks SC to dismiss House appeal on impeachment complaint

Vice President Sara Duterte has asked the Supreme Court (SC) to dismiss the House of Representatives' (HOR) appeal on its ruling that declared the impeachment complaint against her unconstitutional.

In her comment, Duterte said the House's arguments were “mere diversions obsessed with trivia and blind to the decision's genuine core reasoning.”

“This fixation on peripheral details downplays the legitimate issue in this case, namely, that the HOR committed grave abuse of discretion and deliberately did away with constitutionally imposed limitations to its power to impeach,” the comment said.

Three impeachment complaints were filed against Duterte in December 2024, all of which were connected to the alleged misuse of confidential funds.

It was the fourth impeachment complaint that was endorsed by over one-third of lawmakers from the House of Representatives and was later transmitted to the Senate as the Articles of Impeachment.

In its July 25, 2025 ruling, the SC said the first three complaints were deemed terminated or dismissed when the House endorsed the fourth complaint. It ruled that the one-year ban on multiple impeachment proceedings is reckoned from the time a complaint is dismissed or is no longer viable.

As a result, the SC said the Senate did not acquire jurisdiction over the impeachment proceedings.

The House filed the motion for reconsideration a day before the Senate archived the impeachment complaint in light of the SC ruling. 

The House argued that the archiving of the first three complaints was done after the transmittal of the fourth complaint, thus not initiating the one-year ban.

Duterte said that while this is true, it is misleading to suggest that the court based its ruling on a misapprehension of the sequence.

Aside from this, she said that the SC did not err when it said that the fourth impeachment complaint was transmitted to the Senate without a plenary vote.

“A perusal of its own Rules on Procedure in Impeachment Proceedings betrays the HOR's assertions. A plain reading of Rule II, Section 2 thereof, reveals that even the second mode of impeachment requires a subsequent referral to the Committee on Justice,” she said.

Duterte said that it was “more absurd” for the House to claim that the first three impeachment complaints were not dismissed even after the transmittal of the fourth complaint, as the House still had numerous session days ahead.

“This contention collapses under the weight of its own logic and the HOR’s own record. The archival of the first 3 prior impeachment complaints on February 5, 2025, after it had already decided to push forward with its preferred fourth impeachment complaint, was a deliberate act of disposition by the HOR itself,” she said.

“Whether the adjournment of that session was temporal or sine die is immaterial. The fact remains that the respondent HOR, by its own doing, formally set those complaints aside.''

Duterte also said that the argument of the House that a new ruling on impeachment cases should be applied prospectively is wrong.

"Jurisprudence dictates that prospectivity shields those outside the case from what might be unfair consequences for them. It does not grant blanket amnesty to the parties whose conduct is precisely found to be constitutionally void, as in this case," she said.

"To permit respondent HOR to claim shelter under the prospectivity application of doctrine is to condone, rather than correct, their grave abuse of the impeachment process."  –VBL, GMA Integrated News