The Popular Party adds to the political offensive due to the Ceuta crisis the judicial one, by raising a new conflict of powers in the plenary session of the Senate on September 8 due to the absences of the Government ministers in the Upper House to give explanations for the massive entry.
The proposal will go forward thanks to the absolute majority enjoyed by the Popular Party in said Chamber, so the formation adds a new dispute with the Executive in the Constitutional Court. The PP requested the appearance of the Ministers of the Interior, Foreign Affairs and Defense during the month of August, but they decided to be absent, justifying that they would give explanations in the Congress of Deputies. The popular spokesperson in the Senate, Alicia García, has defined as a "real shame" the non-appearance of the three ministers, who preferred to "escape" to later give their explanations in the Chamber "that suits them, on the date that suits them and in the conditions that suit them."
With the same argument, the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, announced that they have also taken the matter to the Supreme Court to clarify "if the ministers can refuse to appear in the territorial Chamber and not report what happened in Ceuta." The popular ones trust that the appeal already presented in the high court will succeed for "disobedience." But now they add one more chapter to the legal pressure by appealing to article 110.1 of the Constitution, which allows both Chambers to demand the presence of members of the Government, as well as article 66.2 of the Senate Regulations, which expressly establishes that the members of the Executive are obliged to appear.
"It is not an invitation. It is not an institutional courtesy. It is a constitutional and parliamentary obligation," insists the popular spokesperson in the Senate. The Government warned that the ministers summoned in an extraordinary manner in the Senate during August - Fernando Grande-Marlaska, José Manuel Albares and Margarita Robles - would not attend, claiming that they would go to Congress a few weeks later to explain the role of their departments in Ceuta. But the PP believes that appearing in one of the Chambers does not exclude the other from attending to render accounts. For this reason, Alicia García warns that "the empty chairs of the ministers cannot go unpunished and we will continue to take the Government's decision to hide from the Senate and flee from the Spaniards to court."
With this new conflict of powers, the PP now has more than a hundred complaints before the Constitutional Court against the Government or against Congress. Some argue that the Congressional Board or the Executive block, mutilate or veto laws and initiatives approved in the Upper House; others for the constant rudeness that Feijóo's people denounce towards the Senate. However, none of them have been resolved. The last institutional conflict occurred due to the Executive's veto of the processing of some amendments approved in the Upper House to the law against multiple recidivism. These tweaks that the Popular Party wanted to introduce into the regulations also received the support of Junts and Vox, but the Government vetoed them at the Congress Table, citing budgetary reasons and thus avoiding their debate in Plenary.
