This Monday, January 9, the four new magistrates appointed by the Government and the Judiciary will take office and this week those who will occupy the presidency and vice presidency will be elected
The hurricanes of the Atlantic Ocean have received proper names since the early fifties of the last century. And just as cyclones, typhoons or hurricanes go down in history with those names, the crisis of the Constitutional Court (TC) in Spain should also be blessed with its own name.
Just a few weeks ago the conservative majority forced by six votes against five, what we could call in Roman paladin, the kick in the door of the TC to the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, (said in a “legal” way: the admission of the very precautionary measures required by a “preventive & rdquor; of the Popular Party) to paralyze the measures in the process of legislating aimed at preventing the prolongation of the blockade of the PP, the conservative magistrates of the TC and the members of the CGPJ elected at the proposal of the PP in 2013 and cheered on, if not instigated, by the media of the media-judicial union.
The cost of the sudden unlocking was the resignation of the progressive sector of the CGPJ to defend his proposal to appoint the magistrate Jose Manuel Bandres, of the Third Administrative Litigation Chamber of the Supreme Court. The conservative members commanded by Jose Maria Macias, partner of the Cuatrecasas law firm, recognized that professionally they had nothing to oppose to that appointment. Problem: Bandrés was on their blacklist. He pure McCarthyism.
The Catalan precedent
But, although it is true that the interference of the TC is unprecedented -a conservative magistrate who supported the presentation of the chief engineer-magistrate Enrique Arnaldo He confessed that it gave him “vertigo & rdquor; to do what was demanded of him – this intervention of the Constitutional Court in legislative life has been supported by a series of precedents.
In Catalonia It is argued that what happened in Madrid was the corollary of measures already adopted there in the parliament, and in part it has been so. But it is still striking that the Constitutional Court rejected very precautionary measures to prevent legislating at the beginning of September 2017 (referendum laws and legal transience).
Yes it is true that the TC meddled in telling the Parliament table what could not be debated, what was inadmissible. But all the other actions were carried out in execution of a sentence previously handed down.
The precedent of Alberto Rodríguez
Nobody has remembered these days -because it is a matter that has practically been buried- that before the admission of the very precautionary measures of the PP, the supreme court achieved in October 2021, after some skirmishes between the president of the Congress, Meritxell Batet, and the president of the Second Chamber, Manuel Marchenadeprive the deputy of United We Can, alberto rodriguez, from his seat -affecting the vaunted as sometimes corny ‘ius in officium’, his power as a parliamentarian- with a sentence of fine and disqualification for forty-five days. Neither more nor less is what should be applied, the prosecutor of the Supreme Elizabeth Rodriguez Matthew dixit, in his November 2021 report-, but Batet, after their epistolary exchange and unofficial versions, decided to expel Rodríguez -and deprive his 64,000 voters in the Canary Islands of their representation- from Congress for the entire legislature.
Rodríguez presented – like the deputies of the PP against the measures to unblock the TC – a request for a very precautionary and precautionary measure. The first was rejected outright and the second began a process of allegations. In his report, the chief prosecutor of the TC, Pedro Crespo, requested the restitution of the seat, pointing out that Batet went beyond what the Supreme Court requested. The fact is that there is something more than the idea of estimating the amparo appeal in the TC. But the rapporteur magistrate, María Luisa Balaguer, maintains that Rodríguez’s appeal against the judgment of the Second Chamber (which corresponded to the outgoing conservative magistrate) must first be resolved Santiago Martinez-Vares). However, there is an open precautionary measure in the case of the parliamentary appeal. And a lawyer’s report on it.
But for each other and the resource was left unswept. To all this, a year of legislature has been lost. Does the speakers care what 64,000 voters from the Canary Islands will think? It’s not supposed to. Because, otherwise, they would not have abandoned their responsibility to decide. Neither, of course, the president Pedro Gonzalez-Trevijano, He was to ask the speakers for speed – that is what the president is for, for example – since his task was to intrigue and entangle to remain as long as possible in his nine-year position, which expired on June 12, 2022.
reputation assassination
The offensive of the right-in which the desire of the resignant must also be included Carlos Lemespresident of the CGPJ expired to carry out a coup and name his successor in the person of the president of the First Civil Chamber of the Supreme Court, Francisco Marin Castana half-achieved plan, since the Supreme Court presides over it but not the CGPJ- has been on track with what in the United States is called ‘character assassination’.
Reputation assassination: deliberate and sustained process aimed at destroying a person’s credibility and reputation.
And here, at this point, we return to the beginning of the landscape, to the name of the hurricanes and also of the crises, of this provoked crisis.
It is public that Macias and his boys and girls tried to assassinate the magistrate’s reputation Jose Manuel Bandres and they tried to do it with Clara Martinez de Careagamember of the CGPJ, magistrate of the Supreme Court and wife of the magistrate Candid Count-Pumpido which is why they asked for his “recusal”.
Conde-Pumpido, in the center
But the entire campaign of the media-judicial union, judiciary should be emphasized, has been directed against Count-Pumpido. A phrase of his taken out of context from sixteen years ago has been used (“Once again, forcefully affirm that between social reality and the flight of our robes there is no possible divorce or abstraction. The judges are within that reality, they are part of from it, and they cannot look into space invoking the immaculate distance of their independence& rdquor;).
Or that of your uncorrected particular vote on the state of alarm in which he described the decision of the majority as “an exercise more typical of a courtroom jurist than of the maximum interpreter of the Constitution…, conception, more typical of a layman than of a maximum interpreter of the Constitution…. For this reason, the conservative majority boycotted a plenary session.
However, when the magistrate Andres Ollero qualified in his particular opinion the conclusions of Gonzalez-Trevijano and his group of “teachers’ rights & rdquor; or “establish a priori professorially & rdquor; suspension of rights. For those who can estimate that there are differences, here is the conclusion of Ollero in his private vote. “Throughout the development of the state of alarm, not a few nonsense have been expressed, even by authorized spokespersons, but it is fair to recognize that this extreme has not been reached. A rather torturous interpretation would be necessary to avoid the aforementioned constitutional precept& rdquor ;. Take chestnut!
As of today a new phase opens that should be baptized like this: The reconstruction of the Constitutional Court.
Will it be possible?