Minority Leader Alan Peter Cayetano urged the Senate impeachment court on Monday, July 6, 2026, to consider formally asking the Sandiganbayan to allow detained Senators Jinggoy Estrada and Rodante Marcoleta to take part in the trial of Vice President Sara Duterte.
The proposal came as the 24-member Senate convened as an impeachment court to open the historic proceedings against Duterte, the first sitting Philippine vice president to face trial in the chamber. At issue is the shrinking number of senator-judges available to hear the case. Estrada has been detained since his June 1 arrest on a non-bailable plunder charge tied to the flood-control corruption controversy, and was preventively suspended for 90 days by the Sandiganbayan, an order that bars him from performing his duties as a lawmaker. Marcoleta surrendered to the Sandiganbayan’s Third Division on Monday, hours before the trial opened, after the court issued a warrant for his arrest over a separate plunder charge involving P75 million in undeclared campaign donations. A third Duterte ally, Senator Ronald dela Rosa, has remained out of public view amid an International Criminal Court arrest warrant.
With those three senators sidelined, the number of senator-judges expected to participate has been reduced to 22. That has revived debate over the threshold required to convict Duterte. The Constitution requires the concurrence of two-thirds of all members of the Senate, or 16 votes, to remove an impeached official. Senate President Sherwin Gatchalian, who was elected presiding officer question notwithstanding, has maintained that 16 remains the figure, though some legal observers and members of the prosecution have floated lowering it to 14 or 15 given how many seats are effectively vacant. Cayetano’s suggestion offers an alternative route: rather than adjust the threshold, the court could seek the anti-graft court’s permission for the detained senators to sit as judges.
Both Estrada and Marcoleta are allies of the Vice President and are widely viewed as inclined toward her defense, which makes their participation consequential to the arithmetic of a possible conviction or acquittal. Marcoleta, for his part, has repeatedly claimed the plunder case against him was engineered to keep him out of the impeachment trial and to halt his inquiry into the flood-control scandal, an assertion prosecutors and the Office of the Ombudsman reject. On the trial’s first day, senators elected Senator Francis “Chiz” Escudero as presiding officer, and Duterte opted to appear through counsel rather than testify in person.
