At the request of the PP, the Senate will approve this Wednesday a conflict of powers with Congress caused by the Amnesty law. The previous debate held this morning has served for the different parties to reiterate their positions on the criminal forgetfulness rule, but the popular group, with an absolute majority in the Chamber, did not want to reveal whether, once this unprecedented parliamentary initiative was approved, that They will vote in the afternoon, they will go to the Constitutional Court.
“We will go step by step,” said the PP spokesperson, Alicia García, at the beginning of the plenary session, in which her colleague Antonio Silván was in charge of defending that the Cortes Generales are not legitimized to draft an Amnesty law. as if it were an organic law, since a norm that interprets or alters the Constitution can only be addressed, from its point of view, by the constituent power and not the legislative one.
In this sense, Silván has maintained, a “covert constitutional reform” such as the one proposed by the Amnesty law should not be in the hands of Congress, where a majority of 51% has approved the norm, but would require a qualified majority of two-thirds or three-fifths as a preliminary step. “Congress, by qualifying and processing an amnesty as a proposal for organic law, has exceeded its powers, invading those of the Senate as a constituent power,” has been the argument of Senator PP, who has described the resulting project as “swallow it.” of the Lower House.
This alleged invasion of powers that the PP denounces occurs because Congress has “conditioned” with its actions the functions of the Senate, which it has “ignored” and has prevented it from operating “on an equal footing”, which is why it demands that it revoke The Amnesty law, whose qualification and admission for processing, Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s party understands, should not have occurred. For this reason, once this proposal is approved, it will send a request to the Lower House, which will have a period of one month to respond.
The response from the PSOE has been led by Senator Francisco Manuel Fajardo, who has described as “authentic nonsense” the PP’s attempt to paralyze the processing of the Amnesty law due to its alleged unconstitutionality before it is even promulgated in the Official Gazette. of the State and that the Constitutional Court can act. “This is almost a standstill, everyone,” he exclaimed in an explicit reference to Antonio Tejero’s cry in the coup attempt of February 23, 1981.
“By legal imperative, this Chamber has to legislate,” Fajardo recalled in reference to the report of the general secretary of the Senate, which also warns of the possibility of incurring prevarication otherwise, on which the PP bases its initiative. For the PSOE, the PP only seeks to “evidence from the media point of view its rejection of the amnesty”, for which it does not hesitate to resort to the “filibuster” of an initiative “that has no path whatsoever.” In this sense, the socialist senator has accused the popular party of being immersed in a “fight for the story” to not leave room for Vox.
With the exception of Vox, which will support the PP, and UPN, which on this occasion has distanced itself and announced its abstention due to the “legal doubts” caused by activating an unprecedented institutional conflict, the rest of the groups have seconded, as in the previous debates, the initiative of the parliamentary majority that supports the Government: “What they do is serious. They have reached a point as dangerous as devaluing the institution of the Senate,” lamented Carla Antonelli, from Más Madrid, for whom the debate has been “instrumentalized” by the majority of the PP in a display of “political immaturity.”
Speakers from Compromís, BNG, PNV, Junts and ERC have expressed themselves in similar terms, accusing the PP of “devaluing” the institutions for their “partisan interests” and of not respecting the Constitution that they claim to defend by not renewing the Council. General of the Judiciary: “They made a fool of themselves with the Venice Commission and now they bring this conflict, the Constitutional Court cannot intervene in a law that is being processed. They put the Senate at the feet of horses and treat it as if it were a beach bar,” said Carmen da Silva.
