—Let’s go with everything.
The warning issued by the PP spokesperson in the Senate, Alicia García, from the rostrum translated this Tuesday into an unprecedented scenario. The Popular Party advanced another phase in the game of resistance with its absolute majority in the Upper House against the action of the parliamentary majority of Congress, on a day in which the most repeated word in the hallways was “unpublished.” First and foremost, the Popular Party announced that it will raise “a conflict between bodies” regarding the Senate and Congress for the processing of the amnesty law. Never in 45 years of democracy had a fight between both institutions been requested. In any case, this new movement of the PP will not be able to prevent or further delay the parliamentary path of the norm.
The new labyrinth began this Monday when the report of the Senate lawyers was made public, whose leadership was replaced by the Popular Party in January. The opinion issued by the legal services doubts that the grace measure is constitutional through harsh arguments in which it even speaks of “covert constitutional reform”, although it warns that its processing cannot be blocked in the Upper House Table . But, next, it also remembers that there is the possibility of resorting to “a conflict between constitutional bodies” referred to both Chambers and details the procedure for this purpose. Given this hypothesis, the clash between bodies must be requested by a political parliamentary group and not by the Board. And there the Popular Party clung, which specified the new strategy on Monday, although the possibility “was in the air” for a few days, say PP sources.
The formula of conflict between bodies serves Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s formation both to make noise and to continue boycotting the amnesty law in front of the gallery – despite its null practical effects first—, as if to protect himself against Vox. The extreme right found a new weapon to attack the popular ones and this was claimed by its parliamentary spokesperson, Pepa Millán. However, everything could come to nothing because Congress has the power not to respond and the rule would continue its course due to administrative silence, which would not delay the deadlines either, according to parliamentary sources. In that case, it is the Constitutional Court that will decide without the Lower House having first ruled.
The plenary session to approve the institutional clash will be held after the Easter break. Congress then has a month to respond. In parallel, the Senate has a deadline of May 16 to return the norm to the Lower House, four days after the Catalan elections. Although it could be before that date.
The tension caused by this unprecedented route was reflected in another high-voltage session in the Senate, where the PP spokesperson, Alicia García, announced her next steps. “In the Senate, as in Congress, national sovereignty resides and the Spaniards and the will of the people are represented. And the social majority of the Popular Party is reflected,” García indicated. “The Senate is the representation of all the territories. We are not second-class parliamentarians,” added the spokesperson during her speaking turn in an interpellation addressed to the Minister of the Presidency, Relations with the Courts and Justice, Félix Bolaños. The socialist leader responded later. “They have turned the Senate into a dilatory and obstructionist chamber, when it should contribute to improving standards. All of us who are deputies have also been elected by the citizens,” Bolaños replied. And he called the initiative “artifice.”
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On the other hand, the Board debated and approved in the morning a “proposal for admission to processing” of the amnesty law drafted by the Senate lawyers that incorporates the reasoning against its constitutionality and put forward by the legal services themselves. Something that, as PP and PSOE recognize, does not usually happen. Hence, the popular ones voted in favor of continuing with its processing, while the socialists decided not to participate in said vote. A new situation not seen before and that adds to the string of “unprecedented” situations that the Cortes are beginning to accumulate during this legislature.
Given the position now adopted by the lawyers and the Board of the Upper House, where the PP has an absolute majority and changed the senior lawyer to have greater harmony with its theses, the progressive majority that prevails in the Congress Board continues to support the conclusion of the senior lawyer of the Cortes, Fernando Galindo, who in his report last November did not appreciate “formal defects” in that bill registered by the PSOE and then voted with its allies in the commission and later in the plenary session, nor nor is it a “blatant” violation of the Constitution. That position of Fernando Galindo, who was nominated for that position a month earlier by the new president, Francina Armengol, amid criticism from the PP for his previous tenure as general director of the Government in the Ministry of the Presidency, was very nuanced in his opinion. time for another negative report from the lawyers of the Congressional Justice Commission, led by Piedad García Escudero, former lawyer of the Senate and sister of the former president of that institution, Pío García Escudero.
The parties of the majority of the Congress Board, which control the five components of the PSOE and Sumar compared to the four of the PP, have studied this Tuesday the situation of conflict that seemed to be approaching with the Senate at that time and have concluded that “it What is important is that the law is being processed, as it could not be otherwise, and in the Senate they have until mid-May to send its final text to Congress.” Something that the PSOE spokesperson, Patxi López, later stressed in public, alluding to what article 90 of the Constitution expressly requires. Neither the Presidency nor the lawyers who endorsed the norm in Congress last November are going to enter into controversy with the Senate, although sources from the Lower House add that what they see in the behavior of the Board and the Senate lawyers with that report “They are an idea that comes from whoever comes from,” in reference to the interests of the PP. And in that chapter of insinuations they point out that the PP’s signings for the Senate of Congressional lawyers who are opposed to the amnesty law “have borne fruit.”
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