If they had balls: the math, the moves, and the trial that may never happen

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

Senator Ping Lacson saw it coming. The other day, when he laid out what looked like a hypothetical about Senate leadership and the impeachment math, half the press gallery filed it under speculation. Speculation? More like a preview. He was telling anyone listening what the chamber would look like if a few dominos fell in the right order — and on Monday, they fell.

Sotto is out. Bato is back. Alan Peter Cayetano is Senate President. The Villars and Legarda are seated where the new majority needs them. None of this was improvised.

You can see why Bato had to make the fastbreak. He has not shown his face in the Senate since November 2025. He surfaced on the one day his vote could change the leadership of the chamber that will sit as an impeachment court. By the end of the session, he was hiding from people he claims are NBI agents, and Trillanes was waving around what he says is an ICC warrant. The choreography is too clean to be coincidence. Bato came out because the stakes were worth coming out for. Then he disappeared again, because the stakes of staying were worse.

If they had the nerve, here is how the next few moves play out.

Cayetano declares all leadership positions vacant. Done. Bato delivers the swing vote. Done. Cayetano takes the gavel at the head of a new majority. Done. Then the ICC catches up to Bato, and he is off the board. The new minority — which is to say, the people who were the majority forty-eight hours ago — moves to declare leadership vacant again. The new majority discovers it no longer has the numbers to hold what it just took. The seats flip back. The old majority becomes the majority again.

That is the version where everyone plays their hand. Nobody is playing their hand.

Which brings us to the math, because in the end this is a counting problem dressed up as a constitutional crisis. The new majority has 14 senators. The new minority has 10. Conviction in an impeachment trial requires 16. Neither side has it on paper. Both sides know where the gettable votes are.

The “gettable” votes are JV Ejercito and Juan Miguel Zubiri, who abstained on the leadership question. Abstention in this chamber is rarely indecision. It is a price tag. Zubiri’s wife, the representative from Bukidnon’s 3rd District, was among the nine abstentions on the House impeachment vote. The Zubiris are telling both sides they are open to a conversation. Estrada is doing the same in a different dialect.

Then there is the bloc of the “vulnerables.” Legarda. The two Villars. Pia Cayetano, who happens to be the new Senate President’s sister, which is a vote of a different kind. These four are not ideological holdouts. They are people with exposures — political, familial, commercial — who will move with whoever can offer the most protection and the least embarrassment. In a leadership fight, they go with the winning side of the moment. In a trial, where the math has to hold for weeks instead of hours, they go wherever the wind is steadiest.

This is why, gauging from what Ping Lacson said, the new majority’s actual plan is not to win a trial. It is to refuse to hold one.

The logic is simple and ugly. The moment a trial proceeds, the math gets fluid. Old loyalties stop mattering. Senators start voting their cases instead of their caucuses. And the case list, if you look at it honestly, runs long. Escudero has cases. Estrada has cases. Dela Rosa has the ICC. Imee Marcos has her own exposures, separate from her brother’s. The Villars have their SEC-xy problems, plural. Marcoleta and Go could pick up cases, depending on which way the wind turns. Legarda’s son has problems that are her problems too.

This is what the new majority actually is. It is not a coalition of conviction. It is a Coalition of Those Facing Cases or Almost Damned, and the asset they are protecting is not Sara Duterte. It is themselves. Sara is the firewall. If she goes, the next ones in the queue are people sitting in that chamber.

If they had balls — the other side, this time — they would name this out loud. They would say: we are not going to let the calendar bury this. We will force a trial. And we will remind every senator with a pending case that the prosecutorial machinery cuts both ways. That is not a threat. That is just an accurate description of how leverage works when the cases are real and the files are already open.

Nobody is going to say that, of course. The opposition bench — Aquino, Gatchalian, Hontiveros, Lacson, Lapid, Pangilinan, the two Tulfos, Sotto — is not built for hardball but for press releases.

So here is where we actually are. The House voted 255 to 26 to impeach the Vice President. Twenty-six against. Nine abstentions. That margin clears every supermajority threshold the Constitution has ever required for anything, including the previous constitutions we used to have before we had this one. A vote like that does not happen on a weak case. It happens when the evidence is heavy enough that hiding from it costs more than voting for it.

Which is exactly why the case will probably never be heard.

The only way to defeat a strong case is not to try it. Delay the rules. Question the procedure. Run out the calendar. Wait for a senator to get sick, for a typhoon to disrupt session, for the news cycle to move on to a celebrity breakup or another uber-viral post. Manila politics has done this before. Manila politics is good at this.

To get Bato out of hiding, the stakes must have been very high. They were not high only for him. They were high for everyone in that chamber whose name appears on a docket somewhere, or could.

If they had balls, this would be a fight worth watching.

We will see what we get instead.