The FA senators issued a statement referring to the “very serious tenor of the request for reports of December 2, which was presented by Senator Graciela Bianchi addressed to the National Public Education Administration through the Ministry of Education and Culture, with the sole purpose of and in order to gather information on the functional situation of the teacher, Mirta Mabel Mallo, including her position, the number of teaching hours she performs, if she has been on union leave, if she has absences and if she has been instructed on summaries ”.
The teacher Mallo publicly rebuked President Luis Lacalle Pou for eliminating 150 groups in the UTU and closing the Community Educational Centers in the poorest areas. He said that education is an investment and not an expense.
Article 115
As a result of the situation, the Broad Front requested the urgent referral of the matter to the Constitution and Legislation Commission, in order for it to study and advise the Senate if “there is merit to apply any of the measures provided for in Article 115 of the Constitution of the Republic to Senator Bianchi based on her performance ”.
Article 115 of the Magna Carta establishes that each Chamber “may correct any of its members for disorderly conduct in the performance of their duties and even suspend them in the exercise of the same, by two-thirds of the votes of the total of its members.” .
For the same number of votes, “he may be removed due to physical impossibility or mental incapacity supervening upon his incorporation, or due to acts of conduct that render him unworthy of his position, after his proclamation. The majority of votes present will suffice to admit voluntary resignations ”.
Dishonor
The Frente Amplio legislators assure that Bianchi’s request for reports on the teacher Mallo “seriously dishonors the ontological responsibility that constitutional and democratic states, such as Uruguay, reserve to parliaments, which is to act as a control and counterweight of the government to through the control of the management of the other public powers, meaning that spills over all the tasks and powers that the Constitution attributes to the Chamber of Senators, and its members, giving them a reasonable, certain and determined institutional purpose ”.
The request for reports made by Senator Bianchi “is not intended to control the management of the Ministry of Education and Culture, nor that of ANEP, nor that of UTU, nor that of any public body, in its past or current conformation, but rather focuses exclusively on gathering information on who is today the president of the Association of UTU Officials, who a few days ago had a public exchange with the President of the Republic in the framework of a union demonstration, in full exercise of freedom of expression and freedom of association ”.
Senator Bianchi used a power conferred by the Constitution, in article 118, in a deviant way to its end, configuring, at the discretion of the signatories, “a manifest hypothesis of deviation of power repelled by our legal order, insofar as it is contrary to the principle of interdiction of arbitrariness inherent in the republican democratic form of government, which must be rejected without ambiguity by the political system and by the Chamber, in order to give a clear message to the citizens that this Parliament is a guarantee of the freedom of expression and freedom of association since no one will be persecuted from the Legislative Power when he makes use of such constitutional freedoms that are so expensive for our constitutional State ”.
“It is our sincere feeling that giving effect to the request for reports in question diminishes the proper institutional image of the Chamber of Senators vis-à-vis the citizenry, and furthermore, leaves the government itself and our own President of the Republic in a bad position, being that Bianchi is today in the Chamber the most voted senator of the president’s party ”, the FA legislators remarked.
