McRegor Edmark 007

The House Committee on Justice has completely inverted the constitutional impeachment process. Under the Constitution, a complaint must first be deemed sufficient in form, substance, and ground before it proceeds, meaning the evidence must already be there to support the allegations at the outset.

But that is not what happened here.

Instead, the Committee weaponized its powers to go fishing for evidence after the fact, using the impeachment machinery not to evaluate an already-supported complaint, but to build a case from scratch.

The allegations against Vice President Inday Sara Duterte were not grounded in evidence. They were built on insinuations, innuendos, and unsubstantiated accusations, and then the Committee worked backward to find something, anything, to justify them.

This is a textbook fishing expedition, and it is constitutionally infirm.

The impeachment power is not an investigative license. It is not a tool to gather evidence you don’t yet have. The sufficiency of the complaint in form, substance, and ground must be determined before the process moves forward, not bootstrapped through committee hearings after the fact.

What the House did was not an impeachment. It was persecution dressed up in constitutional clothing.