The PP has revealed what its strategy will be in the processing of the Amnesty law in the Senate, in which it will play with the times depending on its interests and according to how political events evolve in relation to the Catalan elections on May 12. To do this, it will not present partial amendments in the Upper House and will propose a total veto of the norm, which will have to be voted on again in Congress for its final approval.
After a tense meeting of the Senate Board, in which the popular majority has imposed as a safeguard the inclusion of a summary of the lawyers’ report that exposes its doubts about the constitutionality of the Amnesty law in the face of the rejection of the PSOE, which considers this procedure anomalous, the text has been admitted for processing and now begins its journey through the Lower House.
Popular sources have explained that there is now a two-month period, which expires just after Catalonia goes to the polls, for the law to return to Congress, but they have pointed out that this time could run out or not depending on how things go in the political terrain, in which relations between the PSOE and its parliamentary partners, particularly ERC and Junts, may suffer unforeseeable alterations, such as the return of Carles Puigdemont.
In any case, what the meeting of the Senate Board has demonstrated is the unbridgeable gap that exists today between PP and PSOE, which have offered totally different versions of the debate that has taken place within them, in which, paradoxically, , the socialists have rejected the admission for processing of the Amnesty law in the terms in which it has been proposed, with the aforementioned inclusion of the legal reports and the conclusions of the opinion of the Venice Commission in the corpus.
For the PSOE, admission to processing is mandatory, based on what is established in article 90.2 of the Constitution, and there is no place for the inclusion of “legal considerations” other than as an annex, but the PP has wanted to introduce a “summary” of those attached texts because it understands that the Amnesty law comes after a “convulsive” procedure in which everything has been “atypical.”
Thus, the paradox has arisen that the PSOE, promoter of the amnesty for those prosecuted for their participation in the independence process, has rejected the procedure, while the PP, which opposes the measure, has pursued it so as not to incurring a crime of prevarication, but with the additions that allow him to defend his position both before his electorate and before Vox, which demanded that the PP paralyze the amnesty in the Senate when the lawyers themselves had already determined that hindering it was not legally viable.
“It is the first law that comes from Congress this legislature in the midst of a convulsion for which there is no precedent and with two different majorities in the chambers,” PP sources have argued to explain the anomaly. “As it was written, the proposal could not be voted on,” the socialists have replied, for their part, who understand that these “reproaches” had never been made before against a law submitted by the Lower House.