Impeachment court on trial: Senate’s slow-motion collapse of credibility
Several days into the impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte, we are seeing a spectacle that is less a solemn constitutional proceeding but more of a theater of institutional decay. What should be the most consequential accountability exercise available against a sitting Vice President — a body of senators acting, by constitutional design, as impartial judges — has instead revealed a chamber riddled with bias, personal vendetta, procedural incompetence, and a respondent who treats the whole affair with open contempt. If there are any indication so far as to where this trial is headed, we should be alarmed whether the Senate is even capable of conducting a fair trial at all.
The most corrosive problem is not the weakness of the prosecution’s evidence or the aggressiveness of the defense. It is the senator-judges themselves, sworn as neutral arbiters but time and again, behaving as an auxiliary defense team. The Constitution does not ask senators to like, dislike or protect the respondent’s political future. It asks them to weigh evidence. But sadly, we see a recurring pattern of a bench more invested in shielding VP Sara from uncomfortable testimony than in extracting the truth.
Consider the sequence involving NBI Director Melvin Matibag. The moment the Lascañas affidavit was introduced, an explosive document naming VP Sara Duterte as an architect of the Davao Death Squad killings, the defense objected on evidentiary grounds. It also moved to halt the proceedings entirely, asking for a continuance to “study” the ICC material that had been sitting in the public record, in one form or another, for several years already. Surprisingly, Presiding Officer Chiz Escudero granted the defense’s request, overriding the prosecution’s objection.
Since day one, senator-judges have repeatedly slowed prosecution momentum, and Escudero limited the timing of their own questions only after the defense complained about the pace, and entertained defense theatrics, the pattern becomes unmistakable. These are not actions of an impeachment court managing a complex case. These are actions of an impeachment court managing outcomes.
Escudero’s decision to restrain senators from interjecting mid-testimony, framed as an efficiency measure, arrived suspiciously late, only after eight days of freewheeling interruptions that mostly worked to interrupt the prosecution’s momentum rather than clarify facts for the record. As a true neutral presiding officer, Escudero should have enforced trial discipline from day one, applied evenly to both sides. But enforcing it only once when the prosecution finally produces a witness who might move the needle, looks more like damage control. (Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian should have noticed this pattern but apparently, he may be ignorant or allowed himself to be played)
An unbiased senator-judge does not need to defend a respondent. The respondent has a defense panel for that. The senator-judges’ only job is to referee fairly and rule on the law. When judges start doing the defense’s work for it, nitpicking a witness’s word choice, giving weight to survey infographics over documentary evidence, granting continuances at the first sign of inconvenient testimony, they have stopped being judges. They have become co-counsel with a vote.
Something even more damaging is that senators cannot stand each other. The hostilities between Alan Cayetano and Panfilo Lacson, and separately between Cayetano and Erwin Tulfo, are not just political sniping. These are accusations serious enough for criminal acts and, by extension, jail time. When the very men and women tasked to judge whether the VP Sara committed impeachable and possibly criminal offenses are simultaneously hurling allegations at each other that could land them in jail, the entire moral authority of the Senate tribunal collapses.
This is spat is crucial, and not just background noise to the “real” trial. Clearly, it shows the trial’s rottenness. A jury busy prosecuting itself has no credibility left to prosecute anyone else. If Lacson or Tulfo believes Cayetano committed plunder on ghost projects and vice versa Cayetano on alleged criminal acts of Lacson or Tulfo, then, how can trust the collective judgment of an impeachment court whose own members do not trust each other and are actively working to destroy one another. Today, the Senate is not a deliberative chamber but rather a pit of scorpions and a boxing match.
Personal enmity of these quarreling senator-judges inevitably bleeds into alliances, vote-counting, and horse-trading on the impeachment verdict itself. They are not blank slates when they walk into the chamber; they carry grudges, debts, and rivalries with them, and those grudges will shape votes long before the final tally is read.
Another problem is the sheer amateurism of both prosecution and defense panels. A serious proceeding involving an alleged plot to assassinate a sitting President, the First Lady, and a former Speaker of the House, we see a defense lawyer asking a 29-year legal veteran for the Tagalog word for “hearsay” and being corrected on the spot, in open session, for confusing it with “chismis” — gossip.
We saw a defense team objecting to a 100-page ICC affidavit as “a mere scrap of paper” while the prosecution reads from it anyway, prompting the presiding officer to remind everyone, four separate times, that the document is being admitted for a limited purpose only because apparently once was not enough for either side to remember the ground rules. Even an SWS trust-rating infographic was introduced into a criminal-adjacent inquiry about assassination threats, as though public opinion polling is a substitute for forensic fact. Improvisation dressed up as jurisprudence.
Most telling signal in this entire affair is what VP Sara does outside the court. She visited the Senate premises but simply refused to set foot inside the room where her own trial is happening. Not a scheduling conflict but a clear message, that the Senate impeachment court does not matter to her. Her 2028 presidential ambitions are the only tribunal she recognizes, and she has calculated, perhaps correctly, that this Senate proceeding will not be the thing that stops her.
That calculation should trouble every one of us, regardless of political affiliation. A respondent facing charges this serious — grave threats against the President of the Republic, an alleged assassination arrangement, allegations tying her to extrajudicial killings during her time as Davao City mayor — who treats the court convened to judge her with open indifference is telling us how she will treat institutional accountability if she becomes President.
Strip away the procedural noise, but the past hearings already surfaced something no verdict can erase: testimony describing VP Sara who spoke of assassinating a President and was named in a sworn ICC-submitted affidavit as an architect of death-squad killings, and whose own past writings and public conduct point to a pattern of threats and intimidation rather than isolated lapses. Her defenders will say all these are unproven, filtered through hostile witnesses, incomplete investigations, with still unidentified hitman. That is a fair point of law but not a fair point of character.
Whatever the final verdict, the entire nation has now watched, in real time, that VP Sara Duterte was described under oath, in the Senate, as someone with a “pattern of violence” serious enough to warrant a national-security-level investigation into her own words. Our citizens need to ask themselves a much simpler question: is this the temperament we want to hold the codes of executive power in Malacañang in 2028? A woman who skips her own impeachment trial because she already decided it is beneath her, whose closest allies in the Senate are busy accusing each other of crimes, and whose defense has spent days fighting procedural skirmishes instead of substance. VP Sara is offering a preview. Everybody would do well to pay attention before the ballot, not after.
QC Mayor Joy Belmonte keeps winning the public’s trust
There’s a particular kind of leadership that doesn’t announce itself with fanfare but shows up in a senior citizen catching a free bus to a hospital appointment, or a call center employee saving a few hundred pesos a month on fare and other citizens. For a minimum-wage employee riding to work, or a retiree heading to a clinic, that saved fare isn’t symbolic. It’s grocery money, medicine money, tuition money. Multiply that across 50 million rides, and Mayor Joy Belmonte’s Forever Libreng Sakay stops being just a transportation program — it becomes one of the most direct forms of economic relief a local government can offer its people.
Since 2020, the program has grown into a fleet of 90 fully air-conditioned buses, including 13 electric buses, running across eight routes throughout the city. It has served more than 50 million passenger weekdays, mostly workers, everyday commuters, and senior citizens — turning what used to be a daily expense into a daily saving.
Belmonte has built her name on this kind of leadership that has brought a wave of recognition that confirms what many Quezon City residents are feeling: governance that puts people first. Today,
Recently, the Research and Public Management Development (RPMD) named Belmonte the Most Trusted and Top Performing Mayor Nationwide — a distinction that doesn’t come from popularity alone, but from measurable performance and public confidence gathered across the country. For a city as large and complex as Quezon City, home to over 3 million residents, sustaining both trust and performance simultaneously is no small feat, but a leadership style built on consistency rather than optics.
Earlier, Belmonte already made history as the first-ever Exemplary Mayor awardee conferred jointly by the Federation of Filipino Chinese Chambers of Commerce and the Angelo King Foundation. Being the first recipient of any award carries a special weight — it speaks to a governing philosophy that blends economic pragmatism with social compassion, a balance not every local executive manages to strike.
Perhaps the most significant recognition of all is the Gawad Lingkod Bayan ng Pangulo, conferred by the Civil Service Commission as the highest national honor given to public servants. This isn’t a local or sectoral award — it is the country’s benchmark for what it means to serve. It signals that Belmonte’s brand of “people-first governance” isn’t just a campaign slogan; it’s a standard now formally recognized at the presidential level.
Belmonte’s advocacy extends well beyond infrastructure and budgets. She was named LGBTQIA+ Icon of the Year, in recognition of trailblazing initiatives like the Right to Care Card — a program that extends hospital visitation and medical decision-making rights to partners in the LGBTQIA+ community — alongside gender-inclusive ordinances that made QC one of the more progressive cities in the country on this front.
That same commitment to human dignity earned her the Gawad Tanggol Karapatan, from the Commission on Human Rights for her work defending human rights and gender inclusivity. Together, these two honors paint a picture of an LGU that treats inclusion not as talking point, but as policy written into ordinances and services that residents can use.
Taken together — the national trust ratings, the civil service honor, the human rights citations, and a transit program that has quietly moved tens of millions of people without charging them a single peso — these achievements form a consistent pattern. Joy Belmonte’s QC is one where policy is measured not by how it sounds, but by how it improves people’s daily lives.