The end result is that the parliament is basically a farcical attempt to give the appearance of democratic legitimacy to the EU legislative process, but the farce is transparent enough that it just ends up tainting the public perception of the EU institutions.
There are political reasons for this arrangement of course, but I don't want to turn this into (more of) a rant. [EDIT: I end up going into that in this other post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4161285]
What's the best channel by which to call for that action?
He's said he will ignore the decisons arrived at by the democratically elected representatives of the people. That seems a pretty clear indication to me.
The European parliament can't impreach the commission. What it can do is sack them (but all of them, not just one). No evidence of illegality is needed.
Nothing in what he said indicates he wants to try to overrule the parliament, only that the EU executive branch believes ACTA is important, and so if the current solution is not approved by parliament they want all the information they can on how to make it acceptable.
We might not like that he's likely to try to go back for a second try with what will likely be relatively unsubstantial changes, but it is not unusual for proposals to be revised and revisited.
I have no problem with abusing the law to get rid of him ASAP.
I suspect De Gucht may have overestimated his influence here. He has also perhaps forgotten that his term of office is not so long and that the European Parliament could even hold up the appointment of the next Commission if it wanted to make a point about abuse of authority. (It did hold up the first Barroso commission in 2004, forcing a reshuffle of which commissioner was given which portfolio, so this is certainly not an idle threat for the Parliament to make, either.)
- No constitution right from the beginning.
- Executive can overrule legislative (and even judicative?)
- Legislative can hold up executive meetings (??)
- No, commission can't overrule the EP. The parliament can reject commission-proposed legislation, and it can fire the commission.
edit: see the parliament doing its thing against ACTA here: http://www.rt.com/news/acta-committee-final-vote-365/
So the EP is the one that's accumulating power (which is right, but hasn't gone far enough yet)
The EU parliament can not be, and is not, the supreme legislative body for the simple reason that the member states are still sovereign, with the ability to withdraw (though there are some legal questions in some member countries about how that would be possible).
It is the same issue facing the US under the Articles of Confederation, where Congress was effectively powerless to do anything without full agreement of the states.
However the EU "worked around" this in part with the Council and Commission functioning as a sort of an "office of the president" (consisting of heads of the member states and the head of the Commission and a separate Council president) and cabinet respectively, with power delegated from the respective governments of the member states rather than from the parliament.
It is a "workaround" for the fact that a federal EU is currently entirely unpalatable to the electorate in most European countries to make the EU governable - ironically because people are worried about giving the EU more power, while the current arrangement is worse in that regard.
I'm sure in every EU country, most voters would prefer it if the unelected commission couldn't overrule the elected parliament.
E.g. under the UK constitution (yes, the UK has a constitution, it is just not codified in a single act) the UK Parliament is sovereign, to the extent that it can not even bind future parliaments.
So without tricky constitutional changes (particularly tricky because parliament has pretty much "bootstrapped" its own constitutional powers in the UK into a position were giving them away again will need to be very carefully structured to stand up in court) it is pretty much impossible to grant the EU parliament any real power.
This is part of why the current structure of the EU uses a web of treaties to bind the executives of the member states in various to seek the passage of local laws to implement EU directives, with convoluted measures to cajole the national legislatives to follow through. It's still not ironclad - plenty of directives languish in national parliaments for years before being implemented (or get implemented with inconsistent differences in different member countries) exactly because the EU has very few means to push it through - but it's a far stronger method than trying to tie the national parliaments with no constitutional support.
Switzerland is a confederation. Its 26 states have a lot of power, through the senate, state majority on national votes as well as sovereign areas like state taxes, education, state traffic. However, within boundaries, the Swiss national parliament can overrule state parliaments any day (and national people votes can overrule pretty much anything anyway).
Switzerland is a confederation in name and by tradition only, but has had all the features of a federation since 1848.
After civil war in 1847, the new constitution was drawn up expressly to create a federal central government to replace the weak old con-federate governments, and to have the cantons cede some of their sovereignty to it, in the same was the US Constitution had the states cede sovereignty in certain areas - the Swiss constitution of 1848 was to a large extent influenced by the US Constitution.
The current constitutions official name even translates to the Federal Constitution of the Swiss Confederation.
Of the three power bases, only the parliament is democratic, and it has almost no powers. I agree. The way we do politics in Europe, birthplace of democracy, is just sick.
If they do have a referendum and the result is not what the EU wants, another is held.
"If the Court questions the conformity of the agreement with the Treaties we will assess at that stage how this can be addressed."
While it is possible that he wants to try to weasel a procedural end-run around rejections, what he's actually said does not provide any basis for jumping to that conclusion.