The Devil's Excrement

                                Picnic-pit stop for lunch at the beach on the last day of the year

The Devil is biking around the Big Island of Hawaii for the next few days. From there, he wishes every one of his readers a wonderful 2016 and may prosperity and peace come to our beleaguered country, Venezuela, in 2016.

As predicted in my next to last post Constitutional clash is set for the swearing in ceremony of the new National Assembly, as the newly and illegally named Supreme Court Justices of the Electoral Hall admitted a seventh request to have the effects of the December 6th. election suspended.

Up to today, we had known that there were six such requests. They had been introduced on December 28th. against certain Deputies elected on Dec. 6th. But on the 29th. an additional request was introduced to suspend the effects of the whole election in Amazonas State, which implies that the Court is saying that the Electoral processes in which three opposition Deputies and one Chavismo Deputy were elected are temporarily suspended.

The whole process was clearly set up by Chavismo to attempt to negate the 2/3 majority by the opposition on the new Parliament. But the whole process in itself stinks:

-One of the “Justices” considering the cases voted for herself as a Deputy.

-The lawyer that introduced the case is a public employee, which is illegal.

-The members of the Electoral Hall were on vacation and suddenly decided to end it.

-The opposition had recused all of the members of the Electoral Hall, which implied they had to resolve that, before the cases could be considered.

What is most interesting is that the opposition’s interpretation is that the decision by the Electoral Hall is not applicable, because the election is over, the candidates had been proclaimed and the request can no longer be executed. According to this interpretation, the Deputies had been proclaimed and thus the Electoral Hall can no longer suspend the process and at this point only the National Assembly itself (Art. 187 of the Constitution) can “qualify its members and know about their resignation…”

Thus, the MUD argues the Court has no Jurisdiction on this.

In fact, the article linked above, the best article on the subject, also notes that in the absence of these four Deputies, the opposition would still retain the 2/3 majority, because it would be counted on the basis of existing Deputies, not possible Deputies.

But perhaps the weirdest thing about the case, is that none of the races involved in Amazonas are close. The closest is that of Deputy Nirma Guarulla elected by 2,260 votes out of 63 thousand and some votes, a difference that seems very difficult to overturn.

The rest are almost impossible, as the Deputies elected by list split the votes in half and both got elected, one for the opposition and one for Chavismo. (They got 63 thousand of roughly 64,000 votes between the two of them)

The final election affected is that of the indigenous representative for the south, which was a runaway victory for the opposition candidate:

which won by about the number of votes that the second place candidate obtained.

Thus, it is unclear at this time what Chavismo aims to do with these results. A place like Aragua had much smaller differences than these, but these cases were rejected by the Court.

In any case, a clash of Constitutional powers is set to take place on Jan. 5th. as the new Assembly will admit all of those elected.

What will the Court and Chavismo do?

And once the Assembly starts working, its next step may be to increase he number of Justices and/or question the validity of those recently elected.

Meanwhile Maduro announced his new “economic” measures, which were so stupid that it is not even worth mentioning…