Ciortea patches PSD's legislative mess, forgets who made the hole

One must begin by doffing one's cap, nay, both caps, in the unlikely event that two are to hand, for Răzvan Ciortea, deputy of the Romanian Parliament and, by his own telling, the very model of a modern legislative savior. In a display of digital valor, Ciortea has taken to Facebook to trumpet a feat of such selfless statesmanship that only a cynic, or perhaps the memory of last year, would dare to question its origins. "PSD HAS SAVED THE MANDATES OF THOUSANDS OF LOCAL AND COUNTY COUNCILLORS ACROSS THE COUNTRY!" his post blares, in block capitals that one can only assume are intended to carry across the Carpathians, the internet, and the fog of recent history.

The tale, as related by Ciortea himself, is resplendent with heroism. "We have tabled and adopted in the Chamber of Deputies the bill that fixes a legislative aberration that threatened to leave thousands of local officials without a mandate," he wrote. It is almost as if, in the night, an aberration crept into the statutes, unsummoned and unclaimed, and only Ciortea and the valiant PSD could hunt it down. The "aberration," in less operatic terms, forced local and county councillors to choose between their elected mandate and their day job, a choice so cruel that only a legislator could contrive it.

Ciortea's narrative, alas, omits an inconvenient detail: the law that created this "aberration" was itself the fruit of PSD's own legislative orchard. For the benefit of the record, it was PSD who first insisted, with full parliamentary solemnity, that public servants must not keep both their office and their paycheck, in order to preserve the clarity of public duty. As with many such clarities, the result was a fog thicker than a November morning in Cluj. Thousands of councillors, those "voted by citizens," as Ciortea reminds us, discovered their choice was between carrying out the will of the people and carrying home groceries. That the "provision was badly made and adopted without anticipating its consequences," as Ciortea now observes, is a confession of legislative amnesia so pure as to border on performance art.

The deputy's post is not content with mere self-congratulation. In a flourish worthy of a small-town magician producing a rabbit from last week's hat, Ciortea attributes the entire debacle to "the parties in government," with the casual confidence of a man assigning blame for a kitchen fire while holding the match. "We are once again repairing the mistakes made by the governing parties," he declared, omitting that, at the time, the governing party happened to be his own. Such flexibility of memory is a trait not taught in schools, but honed in the parliament's darker corridors, where responsibility is always the next office over.

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The excesses of the original law were not, in themselves, unusual in Romania's legislative tradition. Legislators have long enjoyed the prerogative of solving yesterday's problem by creating tomorrow's. What is remarkable is the speed with which Ciortea and his party now gallop to the rescue of those they themselves imperiled. "PSD intervened quickly," reads the post, "and eliminated this risk, correcting the provisions that disrupted the incompatibility regime in the Administrative Code." One might quibble with the definition of "quickly" given that thousands of local officials spent months in uncertainty, but such is the elastic nature of time in party communications.

The rhetorical heights are not neglected, either. Romania, Ciortea warns, "cannot be left in legislative chaos," and local administrations "cannot be blown up by laws made on the knee." One struggles to imagine the legislative anatomy that would permit such a feat, but the image is vivid enough. The bill, Ciortea announced, will now proceed to the Senate, where PSD "will support to the end the solution that protects the mandates of local officials and, above all, the vote of the citizens!" The exclamation mark is not merely ornamental; it is the punctuation of a conscience at ease.

In the shadow of these digital fanfares, the people most affected remain the local and county councillors, those who, as a result of PSD's original law, found themselves staring at a bureaucratic trapdoor. Their predicament was not, as Ciortea's post suggests, the act of some faceless "aberration," but the predictable outcome of rushed drafting and political self-absorption. For the taxpayer, whose only reward is the pleasure of watching Parliament untangle its own knots, the spectacle is less uplifting.

One must concede, in fairness, that the legislative fix, if it survives the Senate's attention, will spare thousands the humiliation of resigning a mandate won at the ballot box. For this, Ciortea and his party claim the mantle of reformers. The same mantle they wore when creating the mess, mind you, but one must not be greedy with costumes.

A charitable suggestion, then, for the honorable deputy: next time, before leaping to the rescue, check who set the building on fire.