Gov't official Morar: No legal conflict arising from Gov't assuming responsibility for budget laws

The procedure of the government's assuming responsibility for the budget laws did not generate a legal conflict, argued the Justice Ministry's Secretary of State Olivia Diana Morar on Wednesday, as she presented before the Constitutional Court the government's stance on the challenges moved by the heads of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies.

"From the jurisprudence and the very definition of the constitutional legal conflict we can easily see that the existence or non-existence of the constitutional legal conflict is not conditional on the nature of the act or action exercised by any of the authorities allegedly in conflict, and Article 114 of the Constitution clearly stipulates that the government can assume responsibility for a draft act, regardless of the said document's regulatory scope, or of the legal nature of the draft act - be it law or emergency ordinance. We therefore consider that the provisions of the Constitution's Article 146 (a) are not applicable in this case, which is why we deem that no constitutional legal conflict has arisen from the government's assuming responsibility for the budget laws," said Olivia Diana Morar.

In her opinion, the wording of the challenge referred to the Constitutional Court betrays the intention of the Senate and Chamber of Deputies presidents "to politically speculate any attempt by the government to carry out the governing program", by raising obstacles in its way.

The government's representative also said that the MPs had the possibility to submit amendments to the bills and even initiate a censure motion, and added that by assuming responsibility the government has respected the role of Parliament as the sole legislative authority.

Upon leaving the Constitutional Court headquarters, Morar said that the main reason why the government chose to assume responsibility was that it didn't want Romania to end up again like in 2019, when the state budget was adopted towards the end of the first quarter, thus triggering "extraordinary bottlenecks" in the administrative operation.

AGERPRES