Opponents in the Philippines House of Representatives have filed an impeachment complaint against Vice President Sara Duterte for threatening to have President Ferdinand Marcos killed in the event she is killed.

In the complainant, Duterte was accused of violating the country’s Constitution over the alleged threats to kill the president, his wife and the speaker of the House of Representatives.

According to the complainant, the vice president betrayed the people’s trust and is unfit to be the country’s vice president.

It said the vice president’s threats showed the “extent of respondent’s mental incapacity, her depravity and lack of mental fitness to continue holding the high office of vice president of the Philippines.”

“The same constitute not only betrayal of public trust but also a high crime which would warrant her immediate impeachment from office,” the document also said.

But Duterte described her comments as an expression of “consternation” at the Marcos administration’s “failure to serve the Filipinos while it masterfully persecutes political enemies”

“Common sense should be enough for us to understand and accept that a supposed conditional act of revenge does not constitute an active threat. This is a plan without flesh.

“I am confident that an honest scrutiny would easily expose this narrative (of a supposed plot to kill Marcos) to be farce, imagined, or nothing at all,” she added.

Following her threats, the country’s justice department handed a subpoena to her office last Tuesday, inviting her for an inquiry into her alleged plot which President Marcos described as criminal, vowing to fight it and uphold the rule of law in the country.

Marcos and Duterte secured a landslide victory in the Presidential elections in May 2022 elections. However, the two leaders have engaged in a bitter fall-out, leading to Duterte’s resignation from the Marcos Cabinet in June as both education secretary and head of an anti-insurgency body.

Ever since, Duterte who is the daughter of the country’s former President Rodrigo Duterte, has been an active critic of Marcos, accusing him of corruption, incompetence and politically persecuting the Duterte family and its close supporters.

She confessed feeling “used” after teaming up with Marcos for the election and threatened to dig up the remains of Marcos’s father, the late dictator Ferdinand Marcos Sr, from the national cemetery and dump them in the sea.