On July 4, President Chen Shui-bian
Chen stressed that a democratic country must operate a system of party politics under which parties rotate through peaceful transfers of power. He added that under such a system the government must be capable of steering the general direction of policy implementation. Chen also said that even the best of policies would be compromised, even jeopardized, if the legislature failed to support, boycotted or actively opposed them.
On the same day and during general interpellation, Premier Tang Fei
The fact that the two most senior national leaders express such views on the same day is clear evidence that the current system is seriously flawed by problems accumulated over a long period of time and that we can no longer sit idly by as the problems exacerbate, even snowball.
The relationship between the law and politics is epitomized by the French proverb that "law is the child of politics." The submission of draft bills, the discussion and debate in the reviewing of bills, the final engagement when ballots are cast, all are based on nothing less than judgements of political interests, and all are functions of political contest.
Since the Constitution is the basic law of the nation and the "mother" of Taiwan's laws, the conception and birth of the Constitution naturally both took place within a certain political context. All subsequent changes to the Constitution, including amendments and deletions, have all been highly political in nature.
Nevertheless, if we were to over-emphasize the concept of "politics over and above all else," not only would the spirit of the Constitution be lost, but the Constitution itself would become an inappropriate basis for the laws of the land. The death of the Constitution would eventually ensue.
Unfortunately, this is exactly the dilemma facing our Constitution today. While drafting the Constitution in 1946, the KMT supported the five-branch government outlined by Sun Yat-sen
To secure a KMT-headed authoritarian regime and facilitate a "politics first" administration, presidents from Chiang Kai-shek
As a result, the integrity of the Constitution was severely compromised, and people no longer had faith in it as the fundamental legal framework of the nation. Furthermore, articles added through constitutional amendment were often in conflict with the original Constitution, as they had set out to neutralize certain articles of the original.
In recent years, the newly added provisions provided for direct and democratic election of the president and the expansion of presidential power without the supplementary structural reforms required for them to operate with optimum effect.
The Legislative Yuan's power to approve the appointment of the premier, for example, has been removed, without any modification in relation to the Executive Yuan's accountability -- as the supreme executive organ -- to the Legislative Yuan. This has created a situation in which the premier does not consider himself the president's "chief of staff," although he is not popularly elected.
Such constitutional complexity is a rarity in any country and it is surely far behind the Fifth French Republic's very sophisticated constitution under which an efficiently organized "semi-presidential system" operates.
If Taiwan really wishes to implement constitutional democracy, it must decisively and immediately remove all ambiguous articles from the Constitu-tion, and, learning from the best features of other systems, rebuild its constitution.
Lee Hong-hsi is a law professor at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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