The impeachment of Vice President Sara Duterte is being sold as accountability. But it looks more like a purge dressed in constitutional language.
Duterte should answer the allegations against her. No vice president should be above scrutiny. Misuse of public funds, corruption, unexplained wealth, and threats against public officials are serious charges. If proven, they deserve punishment.
But the question is not whether Duterte should be investigated. The question is why she is the only one being hunted.
Why is the House using impeachment as its sharpest weapon against Duterte, while refusing to confront massive corruption allegations surrounding Marcos, his allies, and the very lawmakers now claiming the moral authority to impeach?
That is where the performance collapses.
Only months before the House moved against Duterte, it dismissed impeachment complaints against President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Those complaints alleged betrayal of public trust, culpable violation of the Constitution, graft, corruption, and other high crimes. They pointed to budget insertions, unprogrammed appropriations, flood-control projects, and the broader misuse of public funds.
Against Marcos, the House saw insufficiency. Against Duterte, it found urgency.
That is not justice. That is selection.
The allegations against Duterte may be serious, but they are narrower. The allegations against Marcos reach into the machinery of the state itself. They concern the national budget, the one document through which political power becomes money, contracts, projects, loyalty, and private wealth.
Budget insertions and unprogrammed appropriations are not technical details. They are the bloodstream of patronage politics. Once billions of pesos move through vague allocations, discretionary releases, and politically selected public works, corruption stops looking like an accident. It begins to look like design.
If the allegations are true, Marcos and his House allies did not merely tolerate corruption. They industrialized it. Public works became rewards. Congressional loyalty became purchasable. Flood-control funds became instruments of extraction. What appears on paper as public finance begins to resemble something darker. A ruthlessly efficient machine for turning public money into private wealth.
This is why the impeachment complaints against Marcos mattered. They accused him not simply of personal wrongdoing, but of presiding over a budgetary order in which insertions, unprogrammed funds, and ghost flood-control projects allegedly became tools of corruption and political control.
That is not ordinary corruption. That is alleged state capture through the budget.
At the center of this architecture is Marcos, backed by a House once led by his own cousin, who later lost the speakership amid the ghost flood-control scandal. The accusation is not merely that corruption happened under Marcos’s watch. It is that the budgetary system itself was allegedly converted into a private wealth machine, lubricated by public-works contracts, congressional insertions, unprogrammed funds, and political loyalty.
If investigators followed the money upward, the trail would not stop with contractors or district engineers. It would climb through lawmakers, implementing agencies, budget brokers, congressional leaders, and finally to the president who signed the budgets and presided over the political order that made the releases possible.
That is exactly why the House has no appetite for the truth.
Many House members are not neutral guardians of accountability. They are alleged beneficiaries of the same budgetary ecosystem now under suspicion. Contractors and witnesses have accused lawmakers and public-works officials of demanding kickbacks from flood-control projects. Those accused deny wrongdoing. But the allegation alone stains the chamber now pretending to cleanse the republic.
This is the hypocrisy at the heart of the impeachment. The House is prosecuting Duterte while refusing to confront the larger corruption scandal that could implicate the machinery sustaining its own power. It punishes the rival while protecting the patron. It invokes accountability against Duterte while shielding the system that keeps Congress loyal to Malacañang.
Then came claims that the impeachment vote itself was tainted by offers of cash, operating funds, and projects. House allies denied them. But the allegation fits too neatly into the familiar logic of Philippine politics: budgets as discipline, projects as reward, loyalty as transaction.
A clean impeachment requires clean hands. This one does not have them.
It comes from a chamber accused of payoff politics. It comes from a political class already damaged by ghost flood-control projects. It comes from a ruling coalition that buried complaints against Marcos while elevating charges against the woman most capable of threatening him in 2028.
That does not look like accountability. It looks like power protecting itself.
Marcos benefits most from Duterte’s fall because she is not just a vice president under investigation. She is his most dangerous future rival. She carries the Duterte name, a national base, and the capacity to turn the next presidential election into a referendum on his rule.
If Duterte is convicted, Marcos does not merely weaken an opponent. He removes the strongest rival before voters can decide.
That is the political genius of impeachment for the ruling camp. Elections are messy. Voters are unpredictable. Alliances shift. Public anger can erupt. But a Senate conviction could do what campaign machinery cannot guarantee. It could erase Duterte from the future.
This is how power consolidates itself in a democracy. Not always through tanks or martial law. Sometimes it happens through legal procedures captured by political interest. Sometimes the Constitution is not openly violated. It is used selectively until it serves the powerful.
If impeachment is meant to punish betrayal of public trust, then Marcos should have faced a serious trial first. Not because Duterte deserves immunity, but because the allegations against Marcos go to the heart of the regime itself.
If Duterte is guilty, prove it.
If Marcos is implicated, investigate him.
If lawmakers took payoffs, prosecute them.
If flood-control funds were stolen, recover the money and jail the thieves.
But do not call it accountability when only the rival is punished. Do not call it constitutional duty when the president’s allies are spared. Do not ask the public to believe that the House became a temple of integrity exactly when removing Sara Duterte became Ferdinand Marcos Jr.’s greatest political advantage.
If Duterte falls while Marcos remains untouched, the lesson will be brutal. In the Philippines, accountability is not always about who did wrong. Sometimes, it is about who the powerful can afford to sacrifice.
