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9
la tormenta perfecta del 9 de junio:
sánchez valle, promesa y la quiebra criolla
Bd. of Engineers, Architects and Surveyors
v.
Flores de Otero
,
426 U. S. 572, 597 (1976);… (“[T]he purpose of Congress
in the 1950 and 1952 legislation was to accord to Puerto
Rico the degree of autonomy and independence normally
associated with States of the Union”);
Rodriguez
v.
Popular
Democratic Party
, 457 U. S. 1, 8 (1982) (“Puerto Rico, like
a state, is an autonomous political entity, sovereign over
matters not ruled by the [Federal] Constitution” (internal
quotation marks omitted)). That newfound authority,
including over local criminal laws, brought mutual
benefit to the Puerto Rican people and the entire United
States. And if our double jeopardy decisions hinged on
measuring an entity’s self-governance, the emergence of
the Commonwealth would have resulted as well in the
capacity to bring the kind of successive prosecutions
attempted here.”
7
Sin embargo, en el contexto de lo sucedido ese día, estos
aspectos de la opinión se ahogaron en el estruendo de los
resultados y el contexto de los otros sucesos.
Amplía el Tribunal por voz de la juez Kagan:
“All that separates our view from petitioners is
what that congressional recognition means for Puerto
Rico’s ability to bring successive prosecutions. We agree
that Congress has broad latitude to develop innovative
approaches to territorial governance, see U. S. Const.,
Art. IV, §3, cl. 2; that Congress may thus enable a
territory’s people to make large-scale choices about
their own political institutions; and that Congress did
exactly that in enacting Public Law 600 and approving
the Puerto Rico Constitution –prime examples of what
Felix Frankfurter once termed ‘inventive statesmanship’
respecting the island. Memorandum for the Secretary of
War, in Hearings on S. 4604 before the Senate Committee
on Pacific Islands and Porto Rico, 63d Cong., 2d Sess., 22
(1914); see Reply Brief 18-20. But one power Congress
7 Id. Pp. 13-14.