The popular spokesperson in the Upper House, Alicia García, announced this Tuesday that the PP will urge Congress to withdraw the Amnesty law upon understanding that the report prepared by the secretary general of the Senate on the procedure for processing the Amnesty law, which It is precisely titled “report on the unconstitutionality of the opinion of the plenary session of Congress”, allows us to maintain that, regardless of the content of the norm, whose constitutionality must ultimately be sanctioned by the Constitutional Court, the procedures followed contravene what is established in the Constitution.
Thus, the Senate will raise a conflict with Congress to demand that the Lower House withdraw the amnesty law proposal, an initiative that will be adopted at the request of the PP, which has an absolute majority in the territorial Chamber, understanding that it is unconstitutional and its processing is “fraudulent.”
If Congress does not accept the withdrawal of the law within 30 days, the conflict would end up being settled by the Constitutional Court itself, which must respond to the request promoted by the Senate Board and be subsequently approved by the plenary session of the Upper House. where the PP would carry it forward thanks to its majority.
This conflict between the two chambers of the legislature is totally unprecedented and its consequences are still unpredictable, although, in any case, its implementation, which popular sources place at the beginning of April, would in no case interrupt the maximum period of two months for process the law in the Senate, which ends on May 16, just after the Catalan elections.
“I want to announce that the popular group is going to propose that this Chamber, in defense of its constitutional powers, formally urge the Congress of Deputies to withdraw the amnesty law because it is a covert reform of the Constitution,” García announced in his interpellation to the Minister of the Presidency, Justice and Relations with the Cortes, Félix Bolaños, with whom he has been involved in a heated dialectical clash.
In this way, the PP follows the path pointed out by the Senate lawyers in their report on the Amnesty law sent from Congress, that is, raising a conflict between constitutional bodies that must take the form of a formal request to Congress to withdraw the proposed Amnesty law, which, if not attended to, would end up in the Constitutional Court, which would have to decide whether to provisionally suspend the legislative procedure.
The law of the Constitutional Court speaks in its article 73 of “conflict between constitutional bodies”, which occurs when one institution considers that another has invaded its powers, and, in this way, it will be this judicial body that, foreseeably, will have to resolve the clash of powers created between the Congress and the Senate into which the Amnesty law has resulted in the opinion of the PP.
