Too many decrees, too much space for their mere conversion into law, subtracting it from the legislative activity of the commissions and the courtroom. The Constitutional Affairs Committee of the Chamber has decided to launch an investigation into the emergency decree by the government. The operation should be concluded in very short terms, within this month. An issue, that of excessive recourse to decrees, not only today, since – as recalled by the president of the commission, Francesco Paolo Sisto – already in 1983 it was raised by this same commission, chaired at the time by Silvano Labriola.
The numbers speak for themselves: the percentage of conversion laws out of the total number of laws approved has risen sharply, going from 28,6% in the 27,1th legislature and from 60% in the XNUMXth to the current XNUMX%.
In the current legislature, the emergency decree has unquestionably established itself as the main regulatory instrument, both because the quantitative impact of the conversion laws on the total number of laws has more than doubled (+32,9% compared to the previous legislature), and because the regulatory space for emergency measures - measured in the number of paragraphs occupied by decrees - reached 65,8% of the total (+10,9% compared to the previous legislature).
In short, the emergency decree has in the last two legislatures eroded regulatory spaces first pertaining to financial laws (now stability laws) and budget laws, which have lost weight on the total legislation, falling from 49,3% in the 12,1th legislature to 26,7 .XNUMX% in the XVI legislature and then went back up to XNUMX% in the current legislature.
From the report carried out by the president of the Montecitorio commission, it then emerged that the broad and heterogeneous contents of the decree-laws in fact lead to an alteration of the role played by the parliamentary commissions, often expropriated from the examination of the regulations, which falls within their competence .
If during the last legislature, especially in the final part, under the Monti government - Sisto remarked - there were several cases of veritable omnibus decrees, during the current legislature the practice has been oriented in the direction of adopting 'urgency mostly macro-sectorial - that is, which deal with vast sectors of the legal system, such as public administration, with multiform interventions - or inter-sectoral, involving a plurality of sectors, not always similar to each other.
In this regard, in the current legislature out of 24 conversion laws, as many as 11, ie 45,8%, have been assigned to two joint Commissions; moreover, in 16 cases out of 24, the conversion procedure involved at least 10 commissions, between the referring office and the consultative office.
Sisito's hope is that the government may collaborate to achieve a correct use of the powers provided for in Article 77 of the Constitution and that constitutional, legislative and regulatory changes can be identified that are suitable for undoing those knots that are today to the attention not only of Parliament, which is unable to give an orderly and complete structure to its legislative activity, but also of the government, which is interested in an organic production of legislation, as well as of the community as a whole and of individual citizens , who find themselves in a situation of grave discomfort in the face of a fragmented, disorganized and, too often, precarious production of legislation.
