Sara Duterte asks SC to deny motion to reconsider impeachment case
Vice President Sara Duterte has responded to the motion for reconsideration filed by the House of Representatives before the Supreme Court regarding her impeachment case.
In court documents released by her legal team, Duterte requested the SC to deny the motion for lack of merit.
The House previously challenged the SC's decision declaring the impeachment complaint unconstitutional for having been transmitted to the Senate without a plenary vote. The court also said that the fourth impeachment complaint is barred by the one-year rule in the Constitution because there were three complaints that came ahead of it.
However, House Speaker Martin Romualdez explained that the SC misconstrued the chronology of the events and that the three earlier complaints against Duterte had been archived before the fourth complaint was transmitted.
Duterte criticized that the House's claims are "mere diversions obsessed with trivia and blind to the Decision's genuine core reasoning."
"This fixation on peripheral details downplays the legitimate issue in this case, namely, that the HOR committed grave abuse of discretion and deliberately did away with constitutionally imposed limitations to its power to impeach," she said in the document.
"The HOR's contentions evince a disregard of the limits of its power and the constitutional parameters underlying the impeachment process. Worse, they are demonstrative of a feigned ignorance of the HOR's own overreach and fixate on immaterial details that do not alter the substance of the decision," she added.
While Duterte acknowledged that the transmittal of the fourth complaint came after the archival of the three initial ones, she asserted that it was "misleading to suggest that this court based its ruling on a misapprehension of this supposed sequence."
"It is clear from the decision that the determination by this court that the fourth impeachment complaint violated the one-year bar rule rested not on this incidental sequential detail, but on substantive legal grounds," she said.
She continued, "In fact, respondents do not deny that the archival of the three prior complaints and the initiation of the fourth occurred within a few minutes of each other on the same day. That wafer-thin proximity demolishes their claim that sequence carried any significant weight on the ruling of the court."
The House has yet to respond to Duterte's comment.
Duterte is accused of misusing public funds, amassing unusual wealth, and threatening to kill President Ferdinand "Bongbong" Marcos Jr., the First Lady, and the House Speaker.