Monkey business over EU Commissioners

The TFEU after Lisbon is quite clear on the numbers of Commissioners as follows: ==================================== SECTION 4 THE COMMISSION Article 244 In accordance with Article 17(5) of the Treaty on European Union, the members of the Commission shall be chosen on the basis of a system of rotation established unanimously by the European Council and on the basis of the following principles: (a) Member States shall be treated on a strictly equal footing as regards determination of the sequence of, and the time spent by, their nationals as members of the Commission; consequently, the difference between the total number of terms of office held by nationals of any given pair of Member States may never be more than one; (b) subject to point (a), each successive Commission shall be so composed as to reflect satisfactorily the demographic and geographical range of all the Member States. ===================================== How then can Vincent Brown in an article in the Irish Times today state the following: However, while the Lisbon Treaty states that the number of commissioners shall be 18 or no more than two-thirds of the number of member states, it gives the European Council the discretion to decide otherwise. So the European Council could decide that henceforth, if the Lisbon Treaty is passed, there shall be a commissioner from each member state. So the shape of a possible deal with the Irish could be as follows: that the European Council, at its meeting in October or December, gives a solemn undertaking that if the Lisbon Treaty is ratified by every member state, including Ireland, it will exercise its discretion to have one commissioner for every member state. This would meet the objections of some people in Ireland to the Lisbon Treaty, perhaps a sufficient number of Irish voters. The suggestion is that the European Council can immediately and deliberately override a specific clause in the TFEU, that Commissioners post 2014 be selected on a basis of rotation, permanent members one from each member state cannot possibly be deemed to be rotating therefore the intent of the Treaty, as ratified by Parliaments all across the EU is immediately trashed. If this happens Lisbon effectively means the rule of law is finished within the EU post Lisbon. Will the Irish really agree to that? Let us remember that much of the claimed raison d'etre for the Constitutional/Reform/Lisbon process was the streamlining of the EU Commission. Will this bunch of crooks and shysters really stop at nothing to get this terrible Treaty through?