Via CNN: Honduran congress votes against ousted president
Deposed Honduran President Jose Manuel Zelaya will not be reinstated as head of state, a majority of the Honduran congress voted Wednesday.
In an hours-long process, 114 lawmakers voted in favor of a motion to keep Zelaya a political outcast. A simple majority of 65 votes in the 128-member body was required to reject his reinstatement.
Hardly a shock, given that the vote was about a deal that was supposed to be addressed before the elections. Indeed, once it was clear that the Congress would not vote until after the elections, it was quite clear what the outcome would be.
However, had the Congress voted to restore Zelaya to fill out the lame duck portion of his term (president-elect Porfirio “Pepe” Lobo will assume office early next year) it might have put pressure on states in the region to recognize the election. As it stands, a number of regional powers such as Brazil and Argentina, have said that they will not recognize the outcome.
The reporting on this matter continues to be poor (other recent examples here and here), and underscores how an idea, once out in the public domain, persists. To wit: the CNN piece contains the claim that Zelaya was seeking to hold a vote to extend his term in office:
Congress sought opinions from the nation’s Supreme Court and other bodies before holding the vote. The court ruled last week that Zelaya cannot return to office without first facing trial on charges that he acted unconstitutionally when he tried to hold a vote that could have led to the removal of presidential term limits. The Supreme Court had ruled before the coup that the vote was illegal and Congress had forbidden it.
The coup came on the day the term-limits vote was to have been held.
As I (and others) have repeatedly noted, the vote in question was not about term limits.
December 3rd, 2009 at 10:33 am
Actually the reporting has gotten more careful; note the use of the phrase “a vote that could have led to the removal of presidential term limits.” Frankly it’s unclear what Zelaya’s intentions for the constituent assembly were, although given that he’s a politician it’s reasonable to suspect that those intentions would have somehow been favorable to his gaining political power in some form again; politicians’ actions in reforming political institutions are rarely non-self-interested.