Impeachment is a fitness test, not a popularity contest

By Francis Allan L. Angelo

The numbers arrived a week before the impeachment court got to actual evidence. In the June 2026 Social Weather Stations survey commissioned by the Stratbase Group, 57 percent of Filipinos said they have much trust in Vice President Sara Duterte, unchanged from March, while President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. slipped to 34 percent days before his fifth State of the Nation Address. Both camps have started waving these figures around like closing arguments. They are nothing of the sort. A trust rating cannot convict anyone, and it cannot acquit anyone either.

The confusion is understandable because we keep reaching for the wrong measuring instruments. Criminal courts measure guilt. Pollsters measure popularity. An impeachment court measures something narrower and, frankly, harder: whether a person remains fit to hold one of the few offices the Constitution shields from ordinary removal.

The charter does most of the heavy lifting. Article XI, Section 1 declares that public office is a public trust, and Section 2 lists the grounds for impeachment, ending with the deliberately capacious phrase “betrayal of public trust.” Section 3(7) then draws the line too many commentators miss: judgment in impeachment extends no further than removal from office and disqualification from holding any office, and the convicted official remains liable to prosecution, trial, and punishment in the regular courts. The framers built two separate tracks on purpose. One track asks whether you violated the Revised Penal Code. The other asks whether you may keep the office.

This is old doctrine, not clever lawyering as some are wont to day. Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 65, back in 1788, that impeachable offenses “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.” Charles Black, in his 1974 handbook on impeachment written during the Watergate crisis, argued the same point: the question is not whether the official could be jailed but whether the conduct is seriously incompatible with the constitutional order. Our Supreme Court, in Francisco Jr. v. House of Representatives (G.R. No. 160261, November 10, 2003), treated impeachment as the Constitution’s mechanism for holding its highest officers accountable, subject to judicial review only on questions of process. And in voiding the first Duterte impeachment for breaching the one-year bar, the Court stressed that due process governs every stage of the exercise. Process matters precisely because the stakes are constitutional, not penal.

Our own history shows the standard working, and the standard failing. In May 2012, the Senate removed Chief Justice Renato Corona by a vote of 20-3 for omissions in his statements of assets, liabilities, and net worth. No criminal conviction preceded that verdict, and none was required; the court judged fitness, and the republic survived. Eleven years earlier, the Estrada trial collapsed when senator-judges voted 11-10 against opening the second envelope, prosecutors walked out, and the verdict was rendered on EDSA rather than in the session hall. Political scientist Anibal Perez-Linan, in his 2007 Cambridge University Press study of presidential impeachments across Latin America, found that legislatures tended to convict or spare presidents according to street mobilization and media scandal rather than the weight of evidence. That is the model we flirted with in 2001. It is the model we should refuse now.

Which brings me to week one of this trial. I watched, along with a dwindling national audience, as National Bureau of Investigation agent John Mark Calilung spent hours authenticating a video the entire country memorized in November 2024, while the defense asked whether the clip had been generated by artificial intelligence. Dean Jose Mari Tirol reminded pundits in these pages that impeachment is sui generis, a constitutional process for determining fitness to continue in office, and that its rules of evidence protect every respondent, including one named Duterte. He is correct, and the tedium is the price of a clean record.

But former Senate President Franklin Drilon is equally correct that much of the slog was self-inflicted. The Vice President has never denied making the November 23, 2024 threatening statements against the First Family; her own chief of staff relied on the same recording. Both panels could have stipulated authenticity and reserved their fight for context and meaning. Drilon’s larger point is the one that should be stenciled above the presiding officer’s chair: whether the threat against the President, the First Lady, and the former Speaker was literal, rhetorical, or hyperbolic is immaterial to the constitutional question. “Is that betrayal of public trust if you say, ‘I will kill you’?” he asked. The impeachment court exists to answer exactly that.

The defense’s reported recourse to extreme stress deserves the same fitness lens. Stress is human, and public officials are entitled to their humanity. The Vice President, however, stands first in the line of succession, and hers is the same office that ran through PHP 125 million in confidential funds in eleven days in December 2022, per Commission on Audit records examined by the House. Immense authority and emotional volatility make a poor pairing. If pressure produces televised talk of assassination, the argument does not mitigate the charge; it restates it.

Under this standard, the survey numbers I opened with become what they always were: weather. Duterte’s 57 percent cannot establish restraint, and Marcos’s 34 percent cannot establish betrayal. The pollster interviewed 1,200 respondents with a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points, and it produced a snapshot of sentiment, which is its job. Senator-judges took an oath to do a different job, on a record, in public, article by article.

The September round of surveys will move the numbers again. The constitutional standard should not move with them. Sixteen votes may remove a Vice President, or fail to, but either outcome deserves to rest on a single question honestly answered: does her conduct show the judgment the second-highest office in the land demands? Everything else – the crowds, the ratings, the procedural theater – is noise the Constitution asked us to tune out.