Facing a crowded legislative calendar this fall, the Senate is looking at running Vice President Sara Duterte’s impeachment trial across full working days in October so the chamber can still get through the 2027 national budget.
Senator Joseph Victor “JV” Ejercito, who chairs the Finance Committee, framed the stakes bluntly. He cautioned that the October plan would force the Senate to skip scrutiny of roughly a dozen departments, and that the chamber has little margin for error. “It’s either we finish the impeachment or we have a reenacted budget,” he said, urging colleagues to convene a caucus to hammer out a workable calendar.
Presiding Officer Francis “Chiz” Escudero, laying out the proposal on Wednesday, September 3, 2025, said the trial could occupy entire days on October 1 and 2, October 5 through 9, and October 12 through 15. Under that arrangement, the impeachment court would convene at 10 a.m. and sit into the evening, stretching past dinner when the docket demands it. Escudero said each full session might take testimony from two or three witnesses to move things along, and that senators would lock in the final schedule the following week.
The calendar then bends around the budget. Proceedings would pause so the Finance Committee can hold its hearings, picking back up on November 9 and 16 for a single trial day in each of those weeks, since floor debate on appropriations is expected to consume the rest of those days. The trial would revert to its usual cadence starting November 23 and continue until the case concludes.
“We have to do both,” Escudero said when pressed on the competing demands.
Majority Leader Juan Miguel “Migz” Zubiri underscored how thin the chamber is stretched. He noted that senators have already been putting in roughly 12-hour days, from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., and that budget season could push those hours longer still—appropriations debates, he said, routinely run 12 to 14 hours daily for weeks as members work through the funding of departments, agencies, and government-owned and controlled corporations. “We’re doing three things at the same time for 24 of us,” Zubiri said, pointing to the trial, ordinary lawmaking, and the budget all at once. He added that a backlog of roughly 40 priority measures from the Legislative-Executive Development Advisory Council has piled up, with the Senate able to advance only one or two a week, and floated the possibility that senators forgo their October break to keep pace.
On the prosecution side, the House panel signaled it wants the trial shortened too. Lead prosecutor Gerville Luistro said her team is negotiating stipulations with the defense to trim the evidence phase, and expects to wrap up its presentation on the confidential funds by September 9 if the defense accepts a “reasonable number” of those proposed agreements—a route she said the prosecution is taking specifically to speed the case forward.
Escudero, for his part, acknowledged the imbalance the Senate is up against: more than 300 members handle the budget in the House, while only 24 senators shoulder the identical work. He told Ejercito the chamber would land on a “happy compromise” between finishing the trial and enacting the budget.
