“It’s unheard of!”, they cried out in Moncloa on Wednesday night, before the offensive launched by the Popular Party and the conservative sector of the Judiciary to try to force the Constitutional Court to stop voting on the reform to unblock the renewal of the body of constitutional guarantees, which this Thursday is expected to approve the Congress of Deputies. And by absolute majority. “They are the foundations of democracy!”, they warned Pedro Sánchez’s team in the Government, before the maneuver of the conservatives, after warning that “very precautionary measures have never been granted to stop Parliament.”
The political and judicial battle between the Executive and the main opposition party thus reaches maximum severity, in the midst of an institutional and constitutional crisis due to a blockade by Alberto Núñez Feijóo for the renewal of the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) and the Constitutional Court ( TC) that Pedro Sánchez has been trying to break at all costs, but without success, for years. In the case of the governing body of judges, his mandate expired four years ago. The renewal of the TC, for its part and ultimately, has been pending since last June.
In the Moncloa they were determined to act with “the utmost firmness” in the face of the maneuver that they attribute to the PP and a conservative sector of the judiciary that, according to their complaint, acts at their dictation. And immediately the preparation of the allegations began before the amparo procedure registered by the PP before the TC, in which Feijóo’s party requested urgent precautionary measures to stop the vote in Congress on a bill, promoted by the PSOE and Unidas Podemos, which in his opinion is an attack on the rule of law. The president of the TC, Pedro González-Trevijano, also with the mandate expired since June, agreed to call an extraordinary plenary session for the morning of this same Thursday, to analyze the appeal of the PP.
In the brief of allegations registered before the TC, the PSOE demands “that no precautionary measure be adopted that affects the legislative procedure.” The spokesman for the socialist group in Congress, Patxi López, warned this morning that “the drift of the right in this country has been worrying for a long time.” “But this unprecedented maneuver, which tries to prevent Congress from fulfilling its role, is a qualitative leap that confirms its anti-democratic nature,” he denounced before the PP strategy. “We hope that the decision of this expired TC does not go that way. The logical thing would be that when the law existed, it would meet to decide the constitutionality of the law, but not before ”, he pointed out. Patxi López has warned that, otherwise, “in some way it would be the interference of the Judiciary, with some expired members, in the legislature.”
In its statement of allegations, the PSOE points out to the TC that “the adoption of a very precautionary measure such as the suspension of all or part of a procedure in progress in Congress would affect one of the foundations of our democracy.” “The exercise of legislative power by the Cortes Generales is one of the bases of the rule of law, and agreeing to suspend a legislative procedure that is currently taking place in the Chambers would directly affect it,” the text warns.
“The admission of a precautionary measure that eventually produces the suspension of the parliamentary procedure prevents the group of deputies from legitimately exercising their parliamentary functions, as representatives of the citizens, in whom popular sovereignty resides, for which reason the right to citizens to participate in public affairs through their representatives. An interference of this nature by the Constitutional Court would place the supreme interpreter of the Constitution in a position that does not correspond to it, advancing, through a precautionary measure, a substantive resolution regarding a possible procedural defect, which, if it occurs, could be verified later “. alleges the PSOE.
The Socialists also recall that “there are no precedents in the Courts of the suspension of the legislative procedure due to the complaint or appeal of a minority of deputies or parliamentary groups regarding the procedure developed.” “Parliamentarians have within the legislative procedure the rights that are recognized both in the Constitution and in the regulations and that refer both to the presentation of amendments, as well as to the debate in each of the phases of the procedure and, finally, to the different votes that took place. In this case, there has been no violation of these rights. On the contrary, there would be a violation of the right of political participation of the deputies established in article 23 of the Constitution, in the event that the legislative procedure is suspended, and the debate and voting on the bill is not allowed, with all those amendments that have been incorporated in the course of the process by the relevant majorities”.
This bill that Congress intends to vote on today includes the formula with which Sánchez tries to unblock the renewal of the TC, and also the penal reform that contemplates, among other issues, the repeal of the crime of sedition and the review of the crime of embezzlement for which the pro-independence leaders of the procés were sentenced.
