The Bundestag has to postpone its decision on the so-called heating law – the Federal Constitutional Court is forcing it to suspend the appointment planned for Friday this week. This emerges from a decision published in Karlsruhe on Wednesday evening. The second senate of the court thus granted the urgent application of the CDU member of the Bundestag Thomas Heilmann, who had turned to the judges in Karlsruhe to have the parliamentary treatment postponed. It is currently unclear when the second and third readings in the legislative process on what is officially called the Building Energy Act will be held. According to the Federal Constitutional Court, the final treatment “can no longer take place within the current session week”.
The opposition had raised the accusation that the traffic light coalition only presented a final draft law at the last minute, even though the matter was extremely complex. The finished law should “only just fall into parliament from the back rooms of the traffic lights,” criticized the deputy CDU chairman Andreas Jung. The significantly changed version of the draft was only presented at the end of last week, and further changes followed this week.
The CDU leader speaks of a “serious defeat for the federal government”
Heilmann took the criticism last week as an opportunity to submit an urgent application to the Federal Constitutional Court. His central argument: the law should not come into force until the beginning of the year, so it is possible to postpone its passage to a special session in July.
The court has now endorsed this argument, albeit in an internally disputed decision; two of the seven Second Senate judges involved in the case voted against the decision. However, the court expressly left open whether Heilmann would also win in the main proceedings. In any case, his organ complaint was “not obviously unfounded”.
In order to avoid an “irreversible, substantial violation” of his right to parliamentary participation in the complex legislative process, his application should be granted within the framework of an impact assessment. “The applicant would be irrevocably deprived of the opportunity to exercise his rights of participation to the extent guaranteed under constitutional law during the consultations and the passing of resolutions on the Building Energy Act,” the decision says.
The Karlsruhe court admitted that such an order represented a “considerable encroachment on the autonomy of parliament” – and thus on the “original competence of another supreme constitutional body”. The decisive factor for the order was apparently the fact that there was still enough time before the law came into force on January 1 of next year.
In his first reaction, Thomas Heilmann spoke of a “great success for parliamentarism and, in this specific case, also for climate protection”. CDU leader Friedrich Merz called the verdict “a serious defeat for Olaf Scholz’s federal government”. The federal government’s “unspeakable dealings” with parliament and the public “have now been put under control”.