No quorum, no forum

Too many parliamentarians would seem to think that ‘Ficha Limpia’ means a clean sheet in terms of any appearance in the Congress logbook for entries – there actions do not so much speak louder than words as absences. The failure to reach quorum towards the end of last month on the ‘Ficha Limpia’ bill (barring electoral candidacy for all with upheld corruption convictions) has stolen the attention of pundits voicing suspicions of a tacit alliance between La Libertad Avanza and an otherwise excluded Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to keep the latter in the game as the ideal rival for a polarisation reviving last year’s run-off. Requiring a majority of the 257 deputies or 129 for a quorum to session, that bid only enticed 116 parliamentarians to do their duty (the eight libertarians thus contradicting their anti-caste rhetoric would not have sufficed, as widely assumed) but far from being the only such failure even within that week.

Just two days previously two other bills ran into the same dead end of failure to session – a Radical labour reform drew just 111 deputies while on the same day a rather more determined opposition drive to derail Decree 846/2024 bypassing Congress for foreign debt negotiations still fell well short of quorum with only 120 legislators deigning to take their seats. If once might be an accident while twice looks like carelessness, according to Oscar Wilde, thrice in a single week comes across as the crassest dereliction of duty and this should be the issue, in this column’s humble opinion, not whatever bill might be in question. This column should probably have been written last week but this scribe felt obliged to await the end of this year’s ordinary sessions with the month of November just in case a last-minute quorum miraculously transpired but no.

Such nonfeasance is not limited to one party, one chamber of Congress or one branch of government. A defensive Vice-President Victoria Villarruel has also been doing her bit to keep Decree 846/2024 at bay, blocking any bid to activate the Senate before ordinary sessions ended with November – there is little to choose between the two Houses when it comes to dodging quorum. Nor is any party better than the other – just taking the two bills falling short on November 26, there was very little overlap between the 146 deputies frustrating labour reform (when the entire Peronist Unión por la Patria caucus and the left stayed away) and the 137 deputies preventing any parliamentary self-defence against the decree to keep them out of foreign debt negotiations (when all the leftist deputies were present and all the Peronists except half a dozen from northern provinces recently colluding with the Javier Milei administration). The number of times quorum has been denied in the last four decades of democracy would exhaust the space of this column – suffice it to say that there is no government and no party which has not resorted to this easy (and lazy) way out of any legislation not to its taste.

Congress becomes its own worst enemy when deputies and senators refuse to do the work for which the tax-payer remunerates them, nixing any hopes of Argentina’s ultra-presidential democracy evolving into a parliamentary democracy. When bemoaning the lack of a “clean sheet” anti-corruption bill, why does not anybody question the quorum requirement making its obstruction all too easy in a fragmented chamber elected by proportional representation? Just abolishing the need for quorum would be asking for trouble because then in theory the handful of leftist deputies could enter Congress at 4am one morning and declare Argentina a soviet republic – it would not be so simple, of course, but it would be decidedly messy.

The most effective remedy against eternal lacks of quorum would be the application of a criterion this government is already applying to teachers and state workers among others – docking their pay for every time they do not show up to work. If they do not like certain legislation, they have every right (and perhaps also a duty to their conscience) to vote against it – what they not have is the right not to represent their voters when they are being paid almost 20 times the minimum pension.

Quorum-busting is almost unknown in the outside world (no recorded case in Washington since 1988 although it happened once in Texas more recently during the pandemic). Filibustering going back to the early 19th century is rather more frequent in the United States – far from seeking to cut short sessions, this tactic seeks to prolong them with obstructionist intent by embarking on speeches of up to 24 hours in length in which legislators have been known to read out endless excerpts of William Shakespeare or Charles Dickens or oyster recipes or anything to postpone the resisted bill coming to a vote. But for over a century there has been an antidote to filibustering in the form of the so-called cloture motion to close debate although this requires a two-thirds majority (surely not impossible once somebody has been speaking for hours on end).

Not that deploring the frustration of the “clean sheet” bill is missing the point entirely. Milei is floating a weird logic in arguing that Cristina Kirchner is too corrupt to deserve a pension but not corrupt enough to be denied a candidacy, a logic which leaves him offside with his own voters, 90 percent of whom favour the anti-caste ‘Ficha Limpia’ (for which 30 La Libertad Avanza deputies did vote). All this column proposes is to look beyond this issue to the quorum requirements hamstringing legislation. There is a local saying: “The fault is not the pig’s but the person giving him to eat” and in this case the latter would be quorum.