The Congressional Committee decided this Tuesday to speed up the preparatory debates on the amnesty law next January and to shorten its procedures as much as possible. The intention of the executive branch and its allies, who have a majority in the chamber's governing body, is to hold the debate on the amendments in their entirety on January 9, but Congress will work on those days. The President, the socialist Francina Armengol, has asked the President of the Senate, the popular Pedro Rollán, to make the Upper House room available for this session. The government and the PSOE have already stated that they will only accept small “technical improvements” in the partial amendments of the project so as not to “distort” the content of an “already very moderate” law.
The month of January, like July and August, is not a good time for most parliamentary work and debates. However, as a rule, the Chamber Board violates this rule in exceptional cases, when validating emergency regulations or laws or for reasons of political necessity. The government, the PSOE and their partners have cited all these reasons to make the coming month of January a suitable month from a parliamentary point of view, pointing out that in addition to the amnesty law there will be other issues of interest such as authorization of the budget for the expenditure ceiling or ratification of an omnibus executive decree related to European funds and the crisis of the war in Ukraine. In the third week of January, all government ministers taking up their mandate will also appear in their respective committees.
The PP claims, as its new spokesman in Congress, Miguel Tellado, denounced this Tuesday, that this approval in January was due to the government's interest in hiding these debates around the Christmas holidays. Tellado maintained his strong criticism of the law and of Pedro Sánchez and reiterated that the PP would do everything to boycott this project. It is this strategy that puts the leaders of the administration and the Congressional Presidency on alert because voters could obstruct the upcoming proceedings.
This Saturday, December 23rd, begins the period for submitting amendments to the entire amnesty law, which ends on January 3rd. It is assumed that PP and Vox will register them. The next step should be to debate these amendments in plenary.
The Congress had long ago planned to carry out a series of works in the hall in January this year to modernize the voting and speaker system with touch tablets, so the hall will be out of service. The President of the Lower House, Francina Armengol, asked the President of the Senate, Pedro Rollán, to make this place available for the debate and, according to parliamentary sources, she met with no resistance in principle. However, given the current confrontation between the government and the PP, cooperation cannot be taken for granted. If this plenary session takes place, the project should then be forwarded to the presentation and the commission, in this case the Congressional Judiciary Commission, during the month of January, so that partial changes can be discussed there. In February it would be discussed again in plenary and sent to the Senate, where the PP, with an absolute majority, could delay its final approval for a few more months.
The Congressional Executive Committee has also agreed that the debate on partial amendments will take place in the Judiciary Commission and not in the Constitutional Commission. This decision invalidates the allegations made in recent weeks by the PP against Armengol for the alleged purge of that commission's lawyer, Manuel Fernández-Fontecha, who was replaced by another and who allegedly spoke out publicly against the amnesty. The lawyers of the Justice Commission are Piedad García-Escudero, sister of the former popular President of the Senate Pío García-Escudero, and Isabel Revuelta, former technical secretary general of the Ministry of Defense under the mandate of the popular Federico Trillo.
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Both the Minister of Justice, Presidency and Relations with the Cortes, Félix Bolaños, and the PSOE spokesman in Congress, Patxi López, confirmed this Tuesday that they do not intend to allow or introduce major changes to the amnesty law proposal, but rather case at all, “minor technical improvements” in a law “that is very moderate” and that they do not want to “distort” in view of possible appeals to the Constitutional Court.