Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez asked parliament Tuesday to grant him sweeping legislative powers, for the fourth time since he took office in 1999. The request comes just weeks before a new national assembly with a much greater opposition presence is due to be inaugurated.

Opposition leaders slammed the move and said the government was using the current flood disaster, which has affected hundreds of thousands of people, as an excuse to concentrate yet more power in the presidency.

The so-called "enabling law"' is expected to pass -- perhaps as early as Thursday -- since the current assembly is dominated by pro-government lawmakers.

They voted to give it fast-track treatment, despite complaints by the opposition and some constitutional lawyers that the move was illegal.

Chávez has asked for the power to enact laws by decree for one year.

Assembly President Cilia Flores said the effort would allow Chávez to pass laws that would ensure that those who lost their homes in the country's recent floods and landslides "do not return to risky areas but to decent houses."

But Henrique Capriles, the opposition governor of Miranda state -- one of the worst-hit by the floods -- called the proposed law "a mockery for all our people, including those who voted [in parliamentary elections last September] for members of the government party."

Leopoldo López, leader of the opposition Popular Will movement, told CNN en Español that the enabling law was intended, "to deprive the [new] parliament of space and relevance."

Despite the fact that the current assembly's term expires Jan. 5, it has delegated legislative powers to the president for the next twelve months. Chávez would be able to issue decrees covering a wide range of matters, including topics as diverse as taxes, telecommunications, local government, education and national defense.

In the new parliament, the government will retain a 98 to 65 seat majority, but that is one seat short of the number of votes needed to approve enabling legislation.

In a three-hour broadcast on all radio and TV channels Monday evening, Chávez scoffed at those in the opposition who said parliament would be exceeding its powers. The enabling law, "could last 20 years, gentlemen of the extreme right," the president said.

Normally, parliamentary sessions end in mid-December. But such is the government's determination to make full use of its current majority that it has decided the legislature will sit through the Christmas holidays.

And the enabling law is far from being the only controversial legislation scheduled for speedy approval during this period.

A package of five bills dubbed the "popular power" laws will establish the socialist commune as the basic unit of government and create a so-called "socialist economy" in which barter is prominent and profit frowned upon. State governments and local mayors' offices will be marginalized and a portion of their income transferred to the communes.

Reforms to press and telecommunications laws threaten to censor the Internet, take the opposition television channel Globovisión off most people's TV screens and seriously curtail freedom of expression.

Students and academic staff, meanwhile, are protesting a proposed higher education law that would bring the country's most prestigious universities -- traditionally autonomous -- under firm government control.

Another bill, which might now be handed over to the executive under the terms of the enabling law, would channel all foreign funds for nongovernmental organizations to the state -- for it to distribute at its discretion.

The president, it seems, is determined to fulfill a promise he made after the parliamentary elections, to "finish 2010 at a gallop."

Source:The Miami Herald