The Understudy on Trial: Why Impeaching a Vice President Is Harder Than You Think
Impeaching a vice president is an entirely different political exercise than involving a president, according to our political commentator.
Published on Jun 24, 2026
We know a great deal about presidential impeachment. Political scientists have studied it extensively—how it is triggered, how it unfolds, and what it costs a democracy when it goes wrong. What we know far less about is what happens when the target is not the president but the vice president. That gap matters enormously in practice, because impeaching a vice president is, in critical terms, an entirely different political exercise. And understanding why is essential for evaluating whether any such proceeding can be conducted with the integrity a democracy demands.
Start with the office itself. The vice president is often described as the political system's spare tire—constitutionally indispensable, yet largely invisible in ordinary political life. Most vice presidents spend their terms attending state funerals, breaking tied Senate votes, and waiting. The office confers constitutional significance without conferring real power. It is a position defined, above all, by its contingency. The metaphor is useful but incomplete. A spare tire sits in the trunk, inert and forgotten until the moment it is needed. An understudy is something else entirely.
An understudy watches from the wings, learns every line, and waits for the moment the lead cannot go on. That distinction matters enormously—because a vice president who is also a leading contender for the next presidential election is not merely a spare tire. She or he is an understudy with ambitions of their own, one whose proximity to power makes them the most watched and most threatened figure in the political theater.
And that changes the nature of impeachment in ways that existing scholarship has not fully captured.
When a president faces impeachment, the stakes are unambiguous. Removing the chief executive triggers constitutional succession, disrupts the executive branch, and tests the democratic order in ways that demand the full weight of institutional attention. Everyone understands what is at stake. The political costs of mishandling the process are immediately visible and broadly felt.
When a vice president faces impeachment, the immediate constitutional consequences are less disruptive, but the political incentives surrounding the process are often more ambiguous. And they cut in two directions at once.
On one side, political rivals face a powerful temptation to use the process not as a genuine accountability mechanism but as a weapon of political elimination. An understudy who threatens to upstage the lead is a problem that conventional political competition may not be able to solve.
Impeachment offers a constitutional solution to what is, at its core, a political problem: remove the rival under the cover of procedure and deploy the legislature's most solemn power in the service of the majority's most urgent interest. The disruption to governance is manageable. The political prize — neutralizing a formidable opponent before the curtain rises on the next electoral cycle — is enormous.
On the other side, the vice president facing impeachment has equally powerful incentives to reframe the proceeding as precisely such an attack. Cast accountability as persecution. Mobilize supporters around the narrative of institutional abuse. Transform what should be a solemn constitutional reckoning into a standing ovation — and in doing so, make the trial itself the argument for why the trial should not be trusted. The understudy, threatened with removal before ever reaching the stage, instantly becomes a celebrated martyr. The defendant becomes the hapless victim. And the institution conducting the trial is demonized and turned into a villain.
Weaponizing a Process
This is the inherent ambiguity of vice presidential impeachment. Both sides of the proceedings—prosecution and defense alike—have strong incentives to instrumentalize the process for political ends. The accountability mechanism becomes contested terrain. And the institution tasked with adjudicating it — the Senate — is caught in the middle, pulled simultaneously by rival political forces that the VP's ambiguous position has unleashed.
The Senate, it bears remembering, is not a court. Its members are not judges. They are elected politicians with their own vulnerabilities, electoral calculations, and partisan alignments. The temptation to vote not on the evidence but on the political consequences of conviction or acquittal is not a failure of individual character. It is a structural feature of the proceeding itself.
Comparative experience bears this out. In South Korea, the 2016 impeachment of President Park Geun-hye showed that a process conducted with genuine institutional independence could reinforce democratic legitimacy rather than destabilize it. In Brazil, the same year, the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff showed the opposite: a proceeding widely perceived as politically motivated produced lasting damage to democratic institutions and deepened public cynicism about the separation of powers for years afterward. Neither case involved a vice president. But both illustrate the central lesson that applies here with full force: the integrity of the process is inseparable from its outcome. A constitutionally correct verdict produced by a politically captured tribunal is no verdict at all. It is accountability as theater—and a theater that serves nobody but the actors on stage.
What is ultimately at stake here is not just one official's political future. The impeachment process is designed to demonstrate something about the legislature itself — that it is capable of exercising its most solemn constitutional function with independence, impartiality, and fidelity to evidence rather than political calculation. This is what institutional maturity looks like in practice. Not naivety about politics — every senator knows the stakes, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of bad faith. But the demonstrated capacity to distance the process from the co-equal branch whose officer is being tried, to resist capture by allies and rivals alike, and to let the constitutional procedure run its course on the strength of the record rather than the demands of the political moment.
A legislature that achieves this does not merely render a verdict on one official. It establishes something more durable: that the institution is larger than the politics swirling around it, that the constitutional design can hold even under maximum pressure, and that accountability in a presidential democracy is not merely a slogan but a practice—one that must be performed with integrity precisely when it is most difficult to do so.
The understudy metaphor, in the end, cuts both ways. The vice president waits in the wings, ready to step in should the lead falter. But the Senate also has a role to play — and it is not a supporting one. When the impeachment trial begins, the Senate is not the audience. It is not the stage manager. It is the director—the institution whose judgment shapes the entire production. A director captured by the politics of the moment will stage a spectacle. A director with genuine independence will pursue the truth. The difference between the two is not merely a matter of institutional reputation. It is a measure of how far Philippine democracy has come—and how far it still has to go.
Arjan Aguirre is an assistant professor (on study leave) at the Department of Political Science, Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently completing his PhD in Political Science at the University of Pittsburgh.
Arjan Aguirre is an Assistant Professor (on study leave) at the Department of Political Science, Ateneo de Manila University. He is currently taking his PhD in Political Science at the Department of Political Science, University of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA.