There is nothing permanent in the life of this administration, which left Congress with its majority the week before and a few days later slipped three times in a row in the Senate. An unforeseen clash between the PP, the Catalan pro-independence movement and some left-wing groups in the upper house has delayed the final passage of three important laws, that of the only yes is yes, that of science and that reforming bankruptcy procedures in companies. Between Tuesday and this Wednesday, the Senate inflicted several defeats on the government and approved changes to the three projects that will have to be reviewed in Congress again at the turn of the summer.
It had already happened Tuesday with the laws of sexual freedom and science, and this Wednesday it happened again with bankruptcy. In all three cases, the PP and the Independentistas joined their voices, thwarting the Executive’s desire to have the texts enacted before the holidays.
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Congress always has the final say on legislation. Projects approved there go to the Senate for a “second reading” and, if amended, must be sent back to the House of Commons for final approval.
The government often tries to prevent senators from introducing changes to speed up the passage of legislation. And this stance by the executive often angers upper house circles, who lament that it completely dilutes the Senate’s role as a “second reading” forum. In the last plenary session of the House of Commons before the holidays, which ended on Wednesday, criticism was again heard from several speakers, which did not stop at simple lamentations: the executive was punished with a triple defeat.
The most significant change for the government was the tax in the Science Bill vote held late Tuesday, which passed Congress unopposed. ERC and Junts per Catalunya backed an amendment by the PP removing from the text a provision that United We Can had put in the House of Commons that made researchers’ fixed-term contracts indefinite. The Republican faction had backed the measure in Congress but changed their position in the Senate, claiming that it would significantly increase the cost of the Generalitat de Catalunya’s research programs. Science Secretary Diana Morant expressed her disappointment at what happened and called on the groups to reconsider their position in Congress, where the law will not be reviewed again until September.
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The bankruptcy law changes introduced this Wednesday are much smaller. The four approved Junts Amendments relate only to the regulation of various administrative procedures in insolvency proceedings. They had the support of the PP, the ERC and the confederal left – which group Más Madrid and Compromís among others – a coincidence that led to the defeat of the executive by a single vote.
The most surprising of the series of government backlashes in the Senate was the Comprehensive Guarantees of Sexual Freedom Act, known as the Just Yes is Yes Act. The government was so certain that its passage through the House of Lords would be a mere procedure for ratification that Equality Minister Irene Montero went to the plenary session on Tuesday to seek approval of this “crucial step” in the fight against the law to welcome sexual violence. The unexpected came with a practically irrelevant change by Junts, limited to correcting the gender of a word used in the text’s preamble. The proposal was backed by the PP, ERC, Ciudadanos and the Confederate Left, who sent the bill back to Congress for approval in September.
Feijóo is wrong to choose
The executive managed without problems to give final approval to the explicit reform of the judiciary law designed to facilitate the renewal of four judges of the Constitutional Court whose mandates have expired. In this case, too, there was surprise, albeit on the opposite political side and of no practical importance: the leader of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, wrongly voted for an initiative that was sharply criticized by his party.
The debate on the text made it possible to attend a lesson on judicial independence given by a PP senator with extensive experience on the matter, Fernando de Rosa, whose career has been one of constant back and forth between politics and the courts : from the judge he went Minister of Justice with the government of the popular Francisco Camps in Valencia; then, at the suggestion of the PP, he was Vice-President of the General Council of the Judiciary; In 2015 he returned to the judiciary to preside over the Provincial Court of Valencia and four years later he returned to politics as a senator.
With such baggage, De Rosa had no qualms in denouncing the PSOE’s intention to “occupy” the Constitutional Court. In addition, he called the appointment of Dolores Delgado and her now deputy Álvaro García Ortiz as Attorneys General a “fraud”, in the first case because they had previously been Minister of Justice, and in the second because they had once attended one of the proceedings one of the Galician PSOE organized debate.