El procedimiento legislativo en lectura única

Abstract

Abstract The law-making activity of the Parliament is conceived by the constituent as the highest expression of the general will exerted by the citizens through the mandate granted to their representatives in Parliament, in accordance with Article 66 of the Spanish Constitution. As a consequence, the series of mandatory procedural steps to be followed in the elaboration of a new law, must enjoy special protection emanating, fundamentally, from the nature of the institution where those steps take place, from the organs that execute them and from the subjection of legislative procedure to the democratic principle, as the superior value of our system. The lawmaker has set the rules that govern ordinary legislative procedure in the Constitution and in the Parliament Regulation. However, in those same legal texts, he leaves room for a different procedure: in fact, if exceptional circumstances concur, it is possible to pass a legislative initiative omitting some of the steps that would have been mandatory if such exceptional circumstances -described in the law- had not concurred. It is precisely before the concurrence of special enabling set of circumstances that we are left wondering whether the guarantees inherent to the legislative process, insofar as they were the foundation and the framework in the shaping of the will of the House, are still safeguarded in fast-track legislation procedure and, particularly, in the single-reading legislative procedure. The objectives tackled in our research plan, thus, are the following: - Categorization of the ordinary legislative procedure as a complex of democratic guarantees for the adoption of the political decision in Parliament. - Categorization of special legislative procedure as an exception to the constitutional guarantees of the legislative function. - Analysis of the procedural steps that make up the single-reading legislative process. - Clarification of the system of sources that governs this issue. - Conceptualization of the circumstances that enable this kind of legislative procedure. - Review and critique of each step of the process. - Analysis of the judicial and constitutional consequences of its implementation with respect to the legislative function of the Parliament and the ius in officium of the parliamentarian. - Lege ferenda proposals. The legal dogmatic method has been followed, proceeding, therefore, to the exegesis of the normative precepts involved, of the jurisprudence relevant to the matter at hand, of the bibliographic materials published to date, of historical funds, of Parliament records of proceedings, of comparative law and the corresponding parliamentary practice. Furthermore, the technical problems underlying this process have been examined in depth, the legal categories involved have been reworked, and relevant results and conclusions have been reached in relation to all the proposed objectives, contributing important doctrinal novelties in this regard.