News: Legislative deliberation in the blink of an eye: the benchmark for the prohibition of excessive parliamentary procedures

The fact that legislative proposals are debated and passed within a very short space of time is neither new nor rare. However, the frequency of (supposedly) urgent bills and the speed with which they are debated has increased noticeably. When, in early July 2023, the Federal Constitutional Court prohibited the German Bundestag from placing the second and third readings of the Federal Government’s draft bill to amend the Building Energy Act (GEG) and other laws on the agenda, the reaction was significant. This was because, until then, the Federal Constitutional Court had always exercised restraint with regard to internal parliamentary deliberation procedures and had granted the Bundestag considerable leeway regarding the duration of the legislative process. In an essay published in issue 7 of the *Niedersächsische Verwaltungsblätter*, Professor Hartmann and Simon Marx, formerly an assistant professor in Osnabrück, examine the question of how, under Lower Saxony’s constitutional law, the conflict between MPs’ free mandate and the resulting right to deal with a bill in sufficient detail, on the one hand, and Parliament’s right to decide autonomously on the conduct of the legislative process, on the other, can be resolved. The solution lies in the intra-parliamentary prohibition of excess. The article is based on an expert opinion requested from Hartmann by the CDU parliamentary group in the Lower Saxony State Parliament. A judicial review is currently pending before the Lower Saxony State Constitutional Court in this regard. Find out more here. (external link, opens in a new window)