Fontana against too many ‘monstre’ decrees: “They cause pressure on the Chamber”

The frequent recourse to emergency decrees and the “very broad” contents of the decree-laws themselves “risk causing excessive compression by the chamber called second to examine the measure, where the process before the first lasts well beyond thirty days, as unfortunately the practice of recent years unequivocally attests”. So the Speaker of the House, Lorenzo Fontanaduring a meeting with the presidents of the commissions of Montecitorio.

The omnibus decrees are “hardly compatible with the reduced parliamentary examination times imposed by the constitutional expiry of emergency measures”, underlined Fontana, also observing that “the emergency decree, where recourse to this instrument takes on significant dimensions, is susceptible to produce an alteration of the physiological constitutional structure of the relations between the Government and Parliament in the exercise of the legislative function, fueling tensions in the dialectic between the majority and the oppositions and negatively affecting the planning of the works”. According to the Speaker of the Chamber, it is therefore evident that “the tendency to resort to legislative decrees appears to be growing and has a significant impact on the concrete performance of parliamentary activity”.

The call of Mattarella

Limit the emergency decree. Do not insert matters foreign to the heart of the provision into the decrees, thus making it unrecognizable. Avoid bringing them to the classroom close to their expiration date. At the end of May this was the object of the moral suasion that the President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella did to the presidents of the chambers, Lorenzo Fontana And Ignatius LaRussa. Since the beginning of the legislature there have been 27 decree laws approved by the government, compared to only five ordinary laws. With the aggravating circumstance that these decrees are often stuffed with materials unrelated to the original object, so as to make them unrecognizable with respect to the text that the Quirinal has authorized for presentation to the Chambers