The meeting of the Congress Board held this Friday served, among other things, to appoint the new senior lawyer of the Congress, Fernando Galindo. The appointment is surrounded by controversy because the PP is critical of the profile chosen by the president of the Congress Francina Armengol because Galindo is from the Government itself (he works in the Ministry of Territorial Policy) and the popular people understand that it is an “invasion .” of the Legislative Branch of the Executive Branch. Despite the criticism of the forms, the truth is that Galindo complied with the legal requirements because the Staff Statute of the Cortes Generales indicates that the senior lawyer must be active for more than five years and he has been active for 13.
The PP voted against Galindo at the meeting of the Board and the popular people justified their decision because Armengol rejected the search for consensus: as they continued, he took his proposal directly to a vote, without checking in agreement with PP. It is also true that there is some precedent that the appointment of the top lawyer continues without the unanimity of the Board (today, there are four members of PP, three of PSOE and two of Sumar).
In the past, the person with the longest tenure in the Corps was chosen as the senior lawyer. However, for several decades, that has not happened and now there is more arbitrariness since it was chosen at the suggestion of the president of the Congress. What is also not experienced this time is that until now the senior lawyer was chosen from the workers of the Cortes Generales; However, now the Government has turned around.
Galindo will take office for the first time, predictably, with the amnesty law. And if the custom is registered in the next few hours, you will probably have to prepare a note (common procedure) so that it is qualified at the meeting of the Board on Tuesday and start the parliamentary journey until its approval. In this sense, the judgment will be closely analyzed because the lawyers have already expressed their opposition to the proposal of the amnesty law of the ERC in 2021.
The tension in Congress seems far from abating and will grow with the time of the investiture: in the PP they continue to insist that Armengol should set a date for the investiture of Sánchez, but the president rejects it until there is an agreement with the Junts to avoid defeat. .
