The PSOE will register a bill in Congress to enable the General Council of the Judiciary – which was prevented by decree from making new appointments while it remains in office – to make only the appointments of the two judges of the Constitutional Court.
The Government is determined to renew the Constitutional Court (TC). To this end, it is going to register a parliamentary initiative that will allow the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) to make only the appointments of the two judges of the Constitutional Court that correspond to it. At present, it could not do this because a legal reform undertaken by the PSOE and UNO Podemos prevented it from making discretionary appointments while it was in office. Amongst them, the appointments of the members of the Court of Guarantees.
A priori, this legal reform of the Organic Law of the Judiciary – which Moncloa is now going to partially reverse – was a measure to pressure the PP into agreeing to negotiate a new Council. But, in the long run, it has become a stumbling block to renewing the four judges of the Constitutional Court whose terms of office have expired, because two must be renewed at the proposal of the Judiciary and the other two at the proposal of the Government.
That is why the Executive is now going to register this initiative in the Congress of Deputies: the measure will enable the Judiciary to make only the appointments of the two Constitutional Court judges and not the rest of the appointments that the Judiciary has pending – more than 60 -. With this, the government will achieve the longed-for progressive majority in the body that has caused it so much trouble in recent times with decisions such as the declaration of unconstitutionality of the states of alarm decreed during the pandemic.
The initiative, reported by eldiario.es (a digital diary in the orbit of Unidas Podemos) is expected to be registered in the lower house this Friday: a bill that will be processed via the urgent procedure. This will undo part of what has already been done: that is, the Judiciary will be able to appoint the two magistrates that correspond to it by quota in the Constitutional Court.
Thus, the Government will be able to appoint its two members and provoke the ideological overturn in the court of guarantees. In this way, Moncloa wants to avoid what it would mean to appoint its two magistrates unilaterally, that is, without doing so at the same time as the judiciary.
With the legal reform that the government plans to promote, Pedro Sánchez guarantees himself a progressive majority in the TC, where seven of its 12 members will be close to the government majority.
