One of the most reprehensible maneuvers that have been carried out in the National Congress, more frequently in recent years, is the one practiced by some blocs or individual legislators, who refuse to provide a quorum for the start of parliamentary sessions.
In other words, it means preventing the Chambers from working.
The most recent example is that of the Kirchnerist bloc in the Senate, which refused to provide a quorum for the start of the session convened by the Vice President to elect the authorities of the body. The Kirchnerist senators only entered the chamber when the ruling party and other party blocs had achieved the legal quorum. In passing, I say that the session was absolutely valid because the election of its authorities is an attribution proper to each House and not an act of a legislative nature that would have required the convening of extraordinary sessions.
The attendance of legislators at the sessions of the Chambers is a primary and fundamental obligation, established by the National Constitution, to the point of expressly determining, in Article 64, the possibility that a minority may "compel" absent members to attend the sessions "under the terms and under the penalties that each Chamber shall establish."
In accordance with the above-mentioned constitutional provision, the Rules of Procedure of the Chamber of Deputies, after expressly establishing the obligation of deputies to attend all sessions (article 16), empowers the minority to agree on the manner in which to "compel" those who do not attend, in addition to authorizing the deduction of allowances.
In the Senate, the minority is given the power to have absentees summoned with express mention of their names in two newspapers of the Capital, and if they do not attend a second call for the session, they may be fined or compelled by the public force (articles 27 and 28).
Beyond the constitutional and regulatory provisions, the attendance of legislators constitutes an ethical and moral obligation that derives from the very nature of representation: they have been elected by the people to fulfill the obligations related to the office and enable the normal functioning of the Chamber of which they are members.
Their refusal to do so is a violation of the mandate and trust conferred on them by the citizens. Worse still, the threat of not providing a quorum, as happened on several occasions, is often used as a mechanism of extortion to achieve political advantages, seriously altering the republican and democratic system of government.
The obligation of parliamentarians to attend sessions applies to parliamentary assemblies around the world. An illustrative case is the decision of the Constitutional Court of Spain rejecting an appeal for amparo filed by legislators of the Herri Batasuna party who had been sanctioned for not attending the sessions invoking ideological freedom.
The Court ruled that: "ideological freedom cannot protect attitudes that imply precisely ignoring the main obligation of a public office, which constitutes an inexcusable requirement for the fulfillment of the totality of parliamentary tasks."
In our parliamentary history, an extreme event occurred in the sense that we have been pointing out, when in 1880, due to the institutional conflicts derived from the federalization of the city of Buenos Aires, the Executive Power, the Senate and a part of the Chamber of Deputies decided to settle in the Belgrano neighborhood, while a group of deputies who did not agree with that measure, they decided not to attend the sittings, despite the summons they had received because the House could not sit for lack of quorum. Faced with this situation, the minority decided to declare the positions of the deputies who were not in attendance vacant.
Finally, I cannot fail to say that it is pathetic and embarrassing to see legislators crouching behind the curtains of the chamber or in nearby rooms, waiting for the session to fail and only entering the room when their peers managed to form the quorum to be able to session. In this case, they usually put all possible obstacles in place to avoid the sanction of the projects for which they illegally refused to attend the venue.
Eduardo Menem is a former national senator and former provisional president of the Senate.