Let me set out the facts as Libertad Digital reports them. The government of Pedro Sánchez is still working from the accounts of 2023, because for three consecutive years no new budget has been passed. Yet Funcas, a college of experts in public accounts, shows in a study written by Raymond Torres that the spending of the State and Social Security, which stood at 407 billion euros in the prorogued accounts, rose to 436 billion in 2024 and to 458 billion in 2025, and will reach 485 billion this year: 78 billion more than the law allowed, close to nineteen per cent. Credit modifications come to 84 billion. In the same period, revenues are said to be rising from 630 billion to 767 billion, nearly twenty-four per cent, through economic growth, through inflation, and through the decision not to adjust the tax brackets.

Hear that last point, judges. When money loses its value and the brackets do not move, a citizen who has grown no richer pays more. Who proposed this tax? Who carried it? Which tribe cast its vote for it? Nobody; and yet everyone pays. The triumvirs who once loaded us matrons with a levy at least posted their edict in the Forum, so that we knew what was being taken from us; this tax hides in the weakness of the coin. When the city had to be ransomed from the Gauls, our mothers brought their gold to the treasury unasked, and the senate honoured them for it; they were giving, not being plundered. Good faith between citizen and commonwealth rests on this: that the citizen knows what he gives and why. "Good faith is the foundation of justice", and where a tax grows in secret, the foundation itself is shaken.

Nor is the spending more honest than the levying. Our ancestors made the magistracies annual, so that each year power would return to the people. Later, commands began to be prorogued, rarely at first and for war, then by habit, until those who had once received imperium never gave it back. Prorogation, magistrates, has an innocent name and a dangerous substance. What we learned of commands holds for the treasury: accounts prorogued once, twice, a third time are no longer accounts but mere will. Funcas itself warns, so it is reported, that these instruments were devised for occasional adjustments, not to stand in for annual budgets over several years, and that they have taken from parliament its proper custody of the money.

You will say it is all covered by law. I grant it. But the triumvirs' power too was established by the Lex Titia; a law that lets a magistrate act without law keeps the form of law and removes its force. You will say the money went not into luxury but into Social Security, the regions, the municipalities and public works. That too I grant; the reports say so. But what is given without a vote is a favour, not a right, and whoever receives it owes the one who gave. Cui bono? The man who dispenses without the senate, because he can dispense without the senate. Why they have brought no budget the reports do not say, nor what the government answers; we have heard one witness, and a prudent judge would seek another. But this I would ask them first: if your case is good, why do you not prove it to the house?

I ask no new remedy, but an old one. Let the accounts be brought before the house, and brought every year; let the tax brackets be restored to the value of the coin, so that inflation is not taken for a law duly passed; let nothing be spent that an annual law has not ordered; let those who decide also render account. For what else is it to take from some what is theirs and give to others what is not, if not this: to swell the citizens' burden quietly and quietly hand it out? For the patria, if an enemy presses, we too will bring our gold, as our mothers did. Without a law, not a single coin.