The draft of the ruling on the amnesty that the magistrates appointed by the PSOE are going to approve in the Constitutional Court has now been revealed. After mentioning the word “reconciliation” 14 times – curiously, since yielding to Puigdemont’s blackmail has divided Spanish society in two – the rapporteur of the ruling, Inmaculada Galván, adopts Sánchez’s discourse – who always maintained that amnesty did not fit within the Constitution, until he had to draft it hand in hand with Puigdemont to gain access to La Moncloa – and assures that the amnesty “does not respond to whim or mere voluntarism” and recognizes Parliament’s full powers to do “everything that the Constitution does not prohibit.”
The leader of the opposition has been emphatic: “They want to convince us that buying a government with privileges is legal.” And he recalls that the legal experts, the General Council of the Judiciary, the Supreme Court, and the associations of judges and prosecutors have warned that the law is “immoral” and without support, neither from the Constitution nor from Europe.
The pro-government newspaper El País says that “The Constitutional Court gives the government a breather with the endorsement of the amnesty, which ‘does not respond to whim’ and seeks to ‘improve coexistence’.”
The newspaper El Mundo speaks of “validating arbitrariness,” because in an exercise of escapism, the rapporteur of the Constitutional Court decides to turn a blind eye to endorse the corrupt act of amnesty.
El Español newspaper asserts that the opinion of the Constitutional Court on the amnesty breaks the logic of what is reasonable, arguing that the legislator “can do everything that the constitution does not prohibit” regardless of the “political objective,” which the court does not address.
El Confidencial points out that the Constitutional Court approves “the public interest” and considers the justification of the law to be “objective and reasonable” while refusing to assess whether the government sought to guarantee its investiture, because that is not its concern.
La Razón newspaper, for its part, states that “Pumpido (president of the Constitutional Court) finishes off the dignity of Spain.”
“Pumpido to Sánchez’s rescue” headlines its editorial ABC.
El Debate points out that buying a presidency denied at the polls with the payment of a revolutionary tax to Puigdemont is an unprecedented wrongdoing… that the Constitutional Court is going to validate.
To put things in context, it is true that the Constitution does not prohibit amnesty, which is the prerogative of grace of the legislature, just as pardon is that of the executive. And insofar as it prohibits measures of grace by popular initiative, it can be inferred that it admits them when they have the support of Parliament. So yes, political corruption and what is immoral – buying La Moncloa with an amnesty law drafted by fugitives – can be constitutional. Although it remains shameful.
And to be clear, this is not the first time that the Spanish Constitutional Court has validated as constitutional abominable laws that cause dismay. It already happened, for example, when it validated as constitutional the expropriation of RUMASA, a law made “ad hominem” that allowed an expropriation without fair compensation. Or when it approved the Law on Gender Violence, which overturns the presumption of innocence of men based solely on the testimony of the partner, without the need for any proof. A constitutional law that violates the basic principle of the presumption of innocence and that was approved by the entire Congress during Zapatero’s time, a time when Cándido Conde Pumpido was appointed Attorney General of the State by the PSOE and already spoke, without embarrassment, of “staining his robes with the dust of the road” in order to achieve the end of ETA then.
In short, it is appreciated that there is no nudist party in Spain – if there is, it is not known – and therefore it has no parliamentary representation. Because if Sánchez needed their vote to be president, do not doubt that they would leave us all stark naked. Does the Constitution perhaps prohibit it?
