Could Chiz have remained Senate President?

By Herbert Vego

“Expect the unexpected” has become a famous quotation attributed to Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BCE.

“Expect the Unexpected” is the title of the famous 1998 Hong Kong action film about the unexpected turns of events from the start to the end.

With that quotation in mind, I simply texted my friend Red, “Expect the unexpected,” to quench his thirst for a reason why Pres. Ferdinand Marcos Jr. had kept quiet on the emergence of a hostile majority in the Senate under the presidency of Francis “Chiz” Escudero.

Is he that weak?

By then, Escudero had unmasked himself as a servile ally of Vice President Sara Duterte, who had threatened to kill the President – “no joke, no joke” — in the heat of anger. Being in the line of succession, she could replace Marcos forthwith or before the 2028 presidential election.

The “unexpected” revealed itself on Monday, September 8, when  Escudero was suddenly ousted as Senate president and replaced by Senator Tito Sotto.

To make the long story short, the new Senate majority, comprising 15 out of 24 senators, used to be Escudero enablers.

Escudero fell down after he had been linked to alleged anomalous flood control contractors and his Senate-led decision junking Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial, details of which are already publicly known.

This leads us to ask whether Pres. Marcos has dealt a hand in Chiz’s painful fall.

While we have no proof to buttress that suspicion, a timeline leading to his fall appears persuasive.

To start with, let us go back to February 5 this year when 215 members of the House of Representatives signed an impeachment complaint against VP Sara Duterte on charges of plotting to assassinate President Bongbong Marcos, involvement in extrajudicial killings and incitement to insurrection and public disorder.

At the end if that day, the House forwarded the complaint to the Senate, which was expected to convene itself into an impeachment court.

The next day, Escudero faced the media to announce that it would be unconstitutional for the Senate to hold an impeachment trial while Congress was in a four-month recess. He also cited the need to prioritize pending legislation during the remaining session days before the 19th Congress adjourned sine die.

It was only on June 10, 2025 that the Senate formally convened as an impeachment court, with 22 senators taking their oath as judges, only to remand the articles of impeachment against the vice president back to the House of Representatives.

On June 23, VP Sara wrote a letter to the Senate impeachment court to dismiss the verified impeachment complaint against her for alleged violation of the one-year bar rule under the 1987 Constitution.

By then, she had asked the Supreme Court (SC) to stop the Senate/impeachment court from trying her case.

On July 25, 2025, the Supreme Court, in a 13-0-2 decision penned by Associate Justice Marvic Leonen, declared the Articles of Impeachment unconstitutional based on the one-year bar rule that Sara had cited.

The House and renowned legal luminaries begged to disagree, seeing it as a violation of the Senate’s constitutional mandate to proceed “forthwith”.

On July 28, President Marcos delivered his fourth State of the Nation Address (SONA) at the Batasang Pambansa. The nation waited with bated breath for him to comment on the Court’s decision, but in vain.

After lambasting unidentified individuals involved in substandard flood-control projects that could not prevent severe flooding during the heavy rains, he ended his speech with these words in Filipino, “Mahiya kayo sa inyong kapwa Pilipino.”

On Aug. 4, the House of Representatives, through the Office of the Solicitor General (OSG) filed a motion for reconsideration before the SC, arguing that the SC ruling had factual misunderstandings and interfered with Congress’s constitutional authority to conduct impeachment proceedings.

On August 6, the senators, by a majority decision, voted to archive the impeachment complaint, citing the SC ruling.

On Aug 11, during a press conference at Malacañang, President Marcos denounced the top 15 contractors allegedly behind profiteering from the entire P545-billion budget for flood mitigation projects from July 2022 to May 2025.

And that, my friends, was how the top guns in the senate – notably then Senate Pres. Escudero and then Majority Floor Leader Joel Villanueva – unwittingly revealed themselves as “partners” of contractors behind the substandard and ghost flood-control projects.

Now, what if the Senate had proceeded with the impeachment trial of Sara Duterte, the biggest threat to his presidency, would Marcos have acted differently?

Could Chiz have remained Senate President?

Your guess is as good as mine.