WHY ESCUDERO IS PRESIDING, AND WHY CAYETANO WON'T ACCEPT IT

[An MCT Commentary]

The trial of Vice President Sara Duterte officially opened on July 6, 2026. And before the proceedings even properly began, the Senate was already fighting itself.

The question on the floor: who gets to preside?

The majority chose Senator Francis "Chiz" Escudero. Twelve senators voted yes. Eight voted no. Senator Panfilo "Ping" Lacson was the one who moved for the election. And the Cayetano bloc spent the opening minutes of the historic trial trying to kill the idea before it took hold.

THE MAJORITY'S ARGUMENT

Three things pushed the majority toward Escudero.

One: he is a lawyer. Senate President Sherwin "Win" Gatchalian is not. When you are presiding over what could be the most consequential trial in recent Philippine constitutional history, having someone with a legal background at the helm is not a small thing.

Two: Escudero has been here before. He already served as presiding officer when the Articles of Impeachment (the formal charges voted by the House) were first transmitted to the Senate last year. He knows the procedure. He knows the rules. Lacson explicitly cited that experience as part of the rationale.

Three: the Senate already amended its own rules to make this possible. Senate Resolution No. 48, passed during a special session on June 17, removed the old provision that automatically assigned the Senate president as presiding officer in all impeachment cases. Under the new rules, the Senate can elect an alternative presiding officer through a simple majority vote of members present. Senator Kiko Pangilinan argued that this is well within what the Constitution allows, because the charter does not actually specify that the Senate president must preside when the Vice President is on trial.

The majority had the votes, the legal cover, and a candidate with prior experience. They moved.

THE CAYETANO GROUP'S PUSHBACK

Senator Alan Peter Cayetano and his bloc have been fighting this from multiple angles, and the opposition goes deeper than just the presiding officer question.

The first objection is constitutional. Cayetano argued on the floor that Senate Resolution No. 48 is "null and void." His position is that bending the rules to allow someone other than the Senate president to chair the trial could compromise the entire proceedings. He told his fellow senators directly: "Why don't we follow the Constitution? Amending the rules implementing a null and void rule and violating the Constitution will endanger this hearing."

But the legal argument does not fully explain the intensity of the pushback.

Escudero used to be on Cayetano's side. He was part of the Cayetano majority bloc until June 3, when his surprise appearance at the plenary hall created a quorum and triggered the Senate shakeup that ended with Gatchalian replacing Cayetano as Senate president. Cayetano called that a constitutional crisis and an "illegal coup d'etat." The Supreme Court was even asked to intervene.

So when the majority now installs Escudero as the presiding officer of the most high-profile trial of the current political era, the Cayetano group is not just opposing a procedural choice. They are watching the man who dismantled their majority now be handed the chair of the most watched hearing in the Senate. The anger is personal. The legal arguments came after.

There is also the flood control angle. Cayetano had insisted, back when he was still Senate president, that the Blue Ribbon Committee probe into the multibillion-peso flood control scandal would continue under his watch. He claimed the leadership shakeup was designed precisely to kill those hearings.

Escudero, meanwhile, is reportedly under investigation in connection with the same controversy. Putting him in the chair of the Duterte impeachment trial also conveniently keeps him off the witness list in another investigation.

And then there is history that civil society groups keep raising. When Escudero was Senate president last year, he refused to immediately start the Duterte trial after the House transmitted the Articles of Impeachment. He argued the Constitution did not mandate a "forthwith" resolution.

The case eventually ended up archived after the Supreme Court dismissed it for breaching the one-year bar rule. Groups like 1Sambayan and Tindig Pilipinas have raised this track record directly, calling Escudero as presiding officer "perhaps the most imperfect and one of the most dangerous" choices available to the majority.

THE PART THAT WAS DIFFICULT TO WATCH

Before we get to the vote tally, let us talk about what played out on the floor.

Pia Cayetano and Alan Peter Cayetano were not just arguing a legal position. The way they carried themselves, the clipped tone, the pointed questions, the barely concealed impatience, it read less like constitutional objection and more like two people who had decided that Gatchalian simply does not belong at the head of the table.

Pia has been in this mode for weeks. She questioned orders at the Senate, went on Facebook Live to challenge directives she attributed to Gatchalian's bloc, and when pressed about the leadership change, her response was "common sense" in a tone that made clear she was not offering analysis, she was talking down.

Alan Peter, for his part, spent weeks calling Gatchalian an illegitimate usurper, took the matter all the way to the Supreme Court, and then showed up on July 6 to lecture the Senate floor about constitutional purity while sitting in the minority bloc he helped create by refusing to recognize the writing on the wall.

Fighting for a legal position is legitimate. Treating a duly elected Senate president, one who secured 13 votes, the constitutionally required number, like he wandered into a room he was not supposed to be in, is something else.

You can disagree with Gatchalian on substance. But the register the Cayetano siblings chose, especially on a day as historically significant as the opening of a Vice Presidential impeachment trial, made the whole institution look petty from the outside.

The constitutional questions they are raising are not all without merit. They just chose contempt as the delivery method.

A TRIAL WITHIN THE TRIAL

The vote was 12-8 in favor of Escudero. The trial is now underway. The procedural dispute is not over.

Gatchalian said any formal challenges to the rules must be settled in plenary, not argued as points of order while the trial is running. Pangilinan, for his part, pointed out that the June 17 amendments were unanimously ratified during a special session, which should have cured any procedural defect.

But "unanimously ratified" is a claim worth scrutinizing, because some of the senators who are now objecting were part of that same special session. Whether they voted then and are objecting now, or whether they are making a different argument, has not been fully reported.

The Philippines is attempting to conduct a historic constitutional trial, and the legitimacy of the man in the chair is being contested before a single witness has testified. The Senate has gone through three different Senate presidents in just a few months. Every bloc claims the Constitution is on their side. Every bloc has political reasons to want this trial to go a certain way.

The Cayetano group's opposition has real legal substance buried somewhere inside it. But you cannot fully separate those arguments from the fact that Escudero is the person who broke their majority in the first place.

So here is the question left hanging over all of this. Can you run a credible impeachment trial when the fight over who holds the gavel is still being settled in real time?

[Note: I am aware that Alan Peter raised issues as part of his continuing objection, but they were stricken from the record. I will write about them in the future when more information is available.]