The Philippines’ House of Representatives has voted overwhelmingly to impeach Vice President Sara Duterte, making her the first politician in the country’s history to be impeached twice.

In a vote yesterday, 257 lawmakers in the 318-seat House voted to indict Duterte, Rappler reported, exceeding the 215 House members who approved her first impeachment last year. Twenty-five House members opposed Duterte’s impeachment, while nine abstained.

The impeachment will now move to the Senate for a trial that will determine the 47-year-old’s political fate. If successfully impeached – this requires a two-thirds vote – she will be removed from office and banned from politics for life.

The vote took place on the basis of two impeachment complaints, filed in February, which allege that Duterte misused 612.5 million pesos ($10 million) in confidential funds in her capacity as vice president and education secretary. It also aims at her unexplained wealth, bribery when she was education secretary, and her public threat to have Marcos, his wife, and the president’s cousin Martin Romualdez, the then-House speaker, assassinated in the event of her own killing.

Yesterday’s vote came a week after a House Justice Committee unanimously approved a report that found probable cause in the two complaints against the vice president.

Following the vote, Duterte’s legal team said that it was “fully prepared to defend the vice president before the Senate,” and that it would be “incumbent upon the prosecution to discharge the burden of proof.”

With the vote, Duterte has become the first Philippine official to be impeached twice. She was previously impeached in February 2025, for a similar suite of transgressions, including “violation of the constitution, betrayal of public trust, graft and corruption, and other high crimes.” In July 2025, Duterte earned a reprieve when the Supreme Court dismissed the complaint on the grounds that it violated a constitutional ban on having multiple impeachment proceedings in a single year.

Both impeachments were closely related to the long and bitter political feud between Duterte and President Ferdinand Marcos Jr. The two leaders teamed up to great political effect ahead of the 2022 presidential election, when they both were elected with decisive majorities, but have since fallen out over a mix of personal and political disagreements.

The political gulf became unbridgeable in March 2025, when Marcos allowed Philippine police to arrest Sara Duterte’s father and Marcos’ predecessor, President Rodrigo Duterte, on a warrant from the International Criminal Court (ICC). The 81-year-old is now awaiting trial on charges of crimes against humanity related to his “war on drugs.”

This feud has monopolized the past two years of Philippine politics, and seems set to play a role in the next presidential election in 2028. Sara Duterte has already declared her nomination for the presidency, presumably hoping to use its powers and prerogatives to wreak revenge on her opponents.

The Senate impeachment vote could potentially end Duterte’s presidential aspirations, but despite the strong – indeed, growing – support for Duterte’s impeachment in the House, she stands a much better chance of surviving the trial in the 24-seat Senate.

The Dutertes have a much stronger representation in the upper house, and Sara needs just over one-third of senators to vote to acquit her in order to survive the trial. In a sign of their power, pro-Duterte senators yesterday ousted Senate President Vicente Sotto III and replaced him with Alan Peter Cayetano, an ally of the Dutertes. According to PhilStar Global, this change came “amid swirling rumors that the coup was orchestrated to block an impending impeachment trial of Vice President Sara Duterte.”