The conservatives of the TC will try to stop the debate in the Senate

The Constitutional Court (TC) today faces one of the highest tension plenary sessions in recent times.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
18 December 2022 Sunday 22:32
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The conservatives of the TC will try to stop the debate in the Senate

The Constitutional Court (TC) today faces one of the highest tension plenary sessions in recent times. The PP believes that their rights are being violated due to the way in which the PSOE has decided to process the reform of the law to modify the system of election of the magistrates of the Constitutional Court and wants the guarantee body to paralyze its processing before its approval in the Senate on Thursday.

This claim has broken the Court in two, as will be seen in today's plenary session if a difficult consensus is not reached. Yesterday the PSOE filed two appeals to stop the request of the PP.

The plenary will start at 10 in the morning with three clearly differentiated positions. Magistrates considered conservative are willing to agree to the very precautionary measures requested by the PP and prevent the reform from being voted on in the Senate this Thursday. If so, the processing would return to the beginning for the PSOE to present the amendments within a law related to the object of the modification.

The groups of the Government coalition, PSOE and UP, presented an amendment, included within the reform of the Penal Code, to modify the system of election of the members of the Constitutional. This is precisely what the PP questions, and court sources consider that the complaint is reasonable.

Its president, Pedro González-Trevijano, urgently met in plenary last Thursday to decide on this appeal, but finally postponed the decision until today, Monday, before the vote in the Senate, which will take place on Thursday.

The delay in the decision occurred as a result of the position of the progressive members of the court, who asked for more time. The conservatives did not need it because their criteria were already set. The president, finally, wanted to avoid a confrontation and the image of the five progressives walking out of a plenary session and refusing to vote.

This allowed Congress to carry out a vote last Thursday, between fights and tension within the chamber, with crossed accusations of attempting a coup.

However, it is not at all clear that this situation will reproduce today, Monday. Court sources say that the president believes that these days, the progressives have had enough time to read all the documentation and analyze it to have a fixed criteria.

The progressives' view is that the issue is complex enough to need further analysis and therefore they are still not in a position to vote.

In the background, if the plenary session is postponed again, it could be expected that the Senate vote on the reform and it be definitively approved. Once published in the Official State Gazette (BOE), the precautionary or very precautionary measures would cease to have effect.

For progressives, it is difficult to justify that the TC can paralyze a reform in full parliamentary process because it could mean interference in the legislative power.

There is a third position within the court and it is to achieve an intermediate consensus between the two positions, that is, to recover the institutional meaning and reach an agreement to reduce tensions. The example was all the agreements reached on the laws for disconnection in Catalonia.

Some constitutionalist sources maintain that the best option would be for the court not to assess the very precautionary measures and wait until tomorrow, Tuesday, when the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) holds an extraordinary plenary session to elect two Constitutional magistrates who have been demanding the government for a long time. If that happened, all this long controversy would stop making sense.

In this state of affairs, the PSOE presented this Sunday two writings before the Constitutional Court to try to stop this body from admitting the appeal of the Popular Party. The Socialists allege that stopping the reform violates the rights of citizens, as reported by Diario.es. One of the appeals requests the recusal of Pedro José González-Trevijano and Antonio Narváez Rodríguez, who would resign from their posts if the reform to be debated by the Senate is approved.

According to the writings presented by the PSOE, the Socialists consider that if the PP's petition is admitted, the Constitutional Court "would violate the right of citizens to participate in public affairs through their representatives" and, in addition, it would "disturb" the functioning of the Cortes Generales.

Likewise, the Socialists allege that the filing of the amparo remedies without having exhausted the internal channels is cause of inadmissibility to proceeding with a prior character, "as determined" by the Constitutional Court itself.