In another marathon session, the Plenary of the Constitutional Court has rejected tonight the request of the Senate to lift the suspension very cautious agreed on monday regarding the processing of the reform that will serve the Government of Pedro Sánchez to have a similar majority in the TC.
The Upper House requested in a document presented on Tuesday afternoon to be part of the process initiated after the admission for processing of an appeal by PP deputies against the way in which Congress has processed this reform.
The TC has agreed to have the Senate on the side. But, in rejection of his claim, he has confirmed the need to temporarily paralyze the parliamentary processing of that initiative because, to go ahead, the possible violation of the rights of the minority deputies could not be repaired. An estimatory sentence handed down within several months would be a dead letter.
[El TC decidirá si mantiene en el Senado el bloqueo a la reforma del tribunal]
The president of the Constitutional Court, Pedro González-Trevijano, has summoned the plenary session of the magistrates with the same speed with which it did last week after receiving the request for protection from the deputies of the PP. In both cases, the urgency derived from the fact that Congress -last Thursday- and the Senate -tomorrow- had planned to vote on the modification of the system of election of the members of the TC had been alleged.
adhesive challenge
The meeting began at 7:00 p.m. and ended after 10:00 p.m. In addition to the letter from the Senate, the request of the chief prosecutor before the TC, Pedro Crespo, of reconsider the recusal of González-Trevijano and magistrate Antonio Narváez raised by Unidas Podemos and the PSOE before the PP’s appeal was admitted for processing.
For this reason, the challenges were rejected last Monday and have been rejected again tonight, for six votes to five. The prosecutor did not file a recusal of his ownbut rather adhered to those promoted, extemporaneously, by the partners of the Government.
[El fiscal se suma a PSOE y Podemos para excluir a Trevijano y Narváez y cambiar la mayoría]
By the same proportion of six votes of the conservative magistrates against five of the progressives, the request of the Senate to lift the very precautionary measure has been rejected.
It was him last chance so that the reform of the TC could be approved this Thursday within the framework of the modification of the Penal Code that, in response to the claims of the Catalan separatists, suppresses the crime of sedition and reduces the penalties for the embezzlement of public funds.
The Senate argued its request that the precautionary suspension “causes a maximum severity disturbance to a constitutionally protected interest, such as the fact that the legislative power of the Spanish State, embodied in the Cortes Generales (Congress of Deputies and Senate), which represent the Spanish people, can fully exercise the functions constitutionally attributed to it, without undue interference”
This “disturbance” is, for the Upper House, “particularly serious” for the rights of the senators, to whom they are “denied to exercise in a timely manner the right to amend, debate and vote” the bill from Congress.
According to TC sources, the court already considered these arguments last Monday and will answer them both in the order by which it admits the request for protection of the PP deputies and in the resolution in which it rejects the request of the Senate.
