The People’s Party has pressed the red button. This Friday, its spokesperson in the Senate, Alicia García, announced a “total offensive” to try to stop the legal reform that will facilitate the reduction of the sentences of dozens of ETA prisoners and, in a certain way, will correct the mistake they made in authorizing its processing in Congress. The first step will certainly be to contact the Constitutional Court.
The people do not believe that the legal reform is unconstitutional as such, but they believe they have found a way to delay its application. The formula is to propose a conflict of attributions between Congress and the Senate or, in other words, asking the TC if the Lower House and its President, Francina Armengol, are exceeding their duties.
To understand what is happening, we have to go back to Monday of last week. MPs are having lunch with the news that a seemingly innocuous law will allow dozens of ETA detainees to reduce their prison sentences, by being able to deduct the time they spent in prison in France. PP and Vox, who voted three times in favor of the standard, recognize a misreading.
So the PP, which enjoys an absolute majority in the Senate, decides to postpone its debate in the chamber until the following week (this one) with the intention of putting pressure on the government and giving it time to withdraw the law of his treatment. They didn’t do it.
Now that Monday of this week has arrived, the plenary votes by an absolute majority against the rule, as expected. With one difference: the president of the Upper House, Pedro Rollán, interprets this vote as a Senate veto against the law. This decision was supported by a lawyer’s report that they had secretly prepared during the postponement period.
And what does this text say? First, “there are no comparable precedents” in the history of democracy. But more importantly, “it would be excessively formalistic to ignore the royal will of the Senate Plenary of rejection”. In other words, the absolute majority has more weight than the regulations, which specify that “veto proposals must be formalized in writing” (Art. 107.2).
The lawyer also intervenes and declares: “A rejection by the absolute majority of the Senate plenary is an act that must have the legal effect of a veto, because it has been agreed definitively and globally, with the consequence return of the text to Congress“, summarizes the report. The objective was to force the socialists to express themselves on the law, while they had tiptoed around it.
Return to Congress
The law therefore returns from the Senate to the Congress of Deputies and, as was the case last year, the lawyers of the two chambers do not agree in their interpretation of the regulations. The Table of the Lower House and its president, Francine Armengolthey meet with the lead lawyer, Fernando Galindo, and come to the conclusion that the Senate veto does not exist.
By not recognizing the so-called veto, the president sends the law directly to the State Gazette (BOE) for publication.
EFE
There were three arguments to defend this decision. First, there was no recording “written veto proposal”as required by the rules of the Senate (art. 107.2). Second, that the standard was debated twenty-one days after the start of his treatment and not twenty, as provided for in the Constitution (art. 90.3). And third, that Pedro Rollán I didn’t warn to the senators that they were voting a veto, but they instead announced it to them at the end of the plenary session.
Since it is the power of Congress, the Senate cannot answer you. Rollán then sends a written message to Armengol demanding that his veto be taken into account and, therefore, that another vote take place in Congress. His response also dismantles the part of the argument that talks about the twenty days, given that the deadline actually ended on the very Monday the vote took place (Sunday is a non-working day).
On the other hand, regarding the absence of a veto presented in writing, Rollán emphasizes that “there is no constitutional jurisprudence applicable to this case” and that “there has never been a rejection by absolute majority in plenary without having previously formally presented vetoes. » Furthermore, he adds that “rejection by an absolute majority is the only constitutional condition required to consider that a veto exists”.
Institutional clash
We’re entering the final part of this mess. The PP gave Armengol one month to retract and hold a plenary session in Congress to debate the law. If he fails to do so, they will file an appeal before the Constitutional Court to decide which of the two chambers was right regarding the aforementioned veto.
Whatever you do, the rule will be published at the BOE in the coming days, and no matter how it is resolved, it will eventually “become law.” Indeed, no matter to what extent the Constitutional Court rules in favor of the PP, this decision will only delay the treatment of the norm and the resulting reductions in sentences for ETA detainees, who currently number of 52.
One thing is certain: neither the legal conflict nor the institutional clash between the two chambers can paralyze the treatment of the standard. What would happen, in the best case scenario for the PP, is that the law would be repealed a few weeks before being definitively approved.
If this were the case, we would then return to the chapter on Rollán’s vetobut this time, Congress should accept it and vote on the standard in plenary. The most likely is that it will be approved again – this time without the votes of the PP and Vox – and that then the BOE will reactivate it for the second time. It’s just a matter of time.
