It's been a week of attempts by the pan-blues to stop the referendum.
First we saw the pan-blue presidential and vice-presidential candidates -- Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
That Lien and Soong could even suggest such a thing shows how tenuous the pan-blue commitment to maintaining Taiwan as a democratic state is. Next stop -- deciding which parties voters can vote for.
It is vastly to the credit of the pan-blue local government leaders -- some of them at least -- that they took their responsibilities as elected officials more seriously than the wishes of their party leaders to trash Taiwan's democracy.
The next assault on the referendum came from Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
It is interesting that for all Ma's talk of the illegality of the referendum, the pan-blues have not sought to have that claim adjudicated by the Council of Grand Justices. The reason, we must assume, is that they know this poor drafting leaves their "illegal" claim without a leg to stand on and Ma is simply doing what he does best: misleading and lying to the voters.
The latest attempt to block the law is as ill-founded as Ma's. Article 2 of the law lists what kind of things referendums can be about. And Article 20 says that if the legislature adopts measures corresponding to those in a referendum proposal, then the referendum should be cancelled.
It's a sensible provision; the idea is that since a referendum is usually called to change policy, if the legislature decides to make that change anyway, there is no need to put it to a public vote. So now the pan-blues think that by taking the president's two referendum questions, turning them into statements and passing them as legislative resolutions, they can stop the March 20 referendum in its tracks. Unhappily for them the provisions of Article 2 and 20 do not apply to referendums called under Article 17, as the law makes clear. Once again the pan-blues have found themselves stymied by their poor drafting.
But their real problem is explaining their incompetence to their masters in China. Because the understanding -- correct us if we are wrong -- was that China would let the pan-blues pass the law, which was electorally essential for them, as long as they would make sure that the Democratic Progressive Party would never be able to use it. Now we can see them increasingly frustrated to find that they can't make good on their promise to the people in whose interests they work -- not Taiwan's electorate of course but China's dictators. And thank goodness for that.
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