The legislature’s Constitutional Amendment Committee last week started reviewing proposed amendments to the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution. The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) boycotted human rights clauses because of procedural issues, blocked proposals on voting rights for 18-year-olds — something that has a high level of support from the KMT, the opposition and the public — and insisted upon including absentee voting, something that should be dealt with on the legal level.
None of this was really aimed at overseeing amendments to the Constitution, which the electorate has assigned them to do: It is more about strategy — and insurance in case the KMT loses the next presidential election.
The former head of the KMT Central Policy Committee has said that “the KMT caucus approves of conducting the constitutional amendments in two stages, but in the first stage, we must deal with lowering the voting age, absentee voting, the legislature’s power to approve the premier and the lowering of the electoral threshold for small parties to secure representation in the legislature. If the amendments are to go ahead, these issues must be dealt with together.”
No prizes for guessing that we are going to see two issues that both sides are actually in agreement on — lowering the voting age and the electoral threshold — being met with obstruction by the KMT caucus in the review meetings.
However, the KMT has yet to provide a legitimate reason, from a constitutional government perspective, for why these four issues should be bundled together for review and passage. Some KMT legislators have said that there is not even any consensus within the caucus on bundling the four.
KMT legislators have taken up three amendment review sessions with this matter, wasting valuable time, introducing all kinds of procedural obstructions and refusing to debate the content of individual versions of amendments, and for what?
Do they really intend to continue in this vein for the next few review sessions, playing these obstructive games and getting in the way of debating the issues at hand? Is this infantile, ridiculous constitutional amendment review process really what the public should expect of this “constitutional moment?”
Despite KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) saying that the KMT and opposition should leave their partisan agendas at the door before they debate constitutional amendment issues, the KMT is insisting on packaging all of the proposed amendments together for a referendum next year. Is this not precisely the very worst example of a party clinging to its partisan agenda?
The KMT’s insistence on incorporating the legislature’s power to approve the premier in the Constitution only goes to demonstrate further the distorted approach of not bundling the issues that should be bundled, while insisting on bundling those that do not need to be.
Until we are clear on how the current system of central government should be altered, before we are sure how the president and premier are to interact within our system, until we know what we are to do about amending the relationship of checks and balances between the legislative and the executive branches of government, what good does it do god or man simply to invest the legislature with the power to approve the premier, within constitutional government theory?
Could it be that, through this tactic, the KMT is simply trying to ensure that it will have a stronger bargaining position with rival parties, through the power to approve the premier, out of a pessimistic assumption that it could well lose the presidency in the January elections? Could it be that the KMT regards a responsibility as grave as amending the Constitution as little more than a tactic by which it can, as much as possible, consolidate its own political interests?
Taiwan’s system of constitutional government never really got off the ground. Democratic constitutional government requires all kinds of complementary measures, all of which need to be either strengthened or established in Taiwan.
This current round of constitutional amendments is really only the very first step in the project of embarking on constitutional reform in this nation. Only by allowing this process to get off to a smooth start, unencumbered, can we hope to effectively start along the road to improving Taiwan’s government system.
Given that, if legislators intend to take this constitutional amendments review seriously, it stands to reason that they should not seek excuses to bundle unrelated issues of secondary importance together with other issues for which a consensus has already been formed.
Human rights guarantees and the separation and balance of powers are the two main pillars of a constitution. It has become all too clear that the ROC’s Constitution, in its current form, is simply not up to the job, due to the string of failures, the excessive independence of the executive branch and the fact that the legislature has become so woefully out of touch with what Taiwanese want.
Since both the KMT and opposition agree on the importance of holding this constitutional amendments process in two stages, and recognize that there is no hope of fully debating all of the constitutional reform issues before June 16, it would appear necessary for them to focus their concentration on reviewing the four issues at hand — lowering the voting age, the electoral threshold for small parties to secure representation, the threshold for making constitutional amendments and human rights guarantees — and putting aside pointless squabbles born of the KMT’s preoccupation with securing a safety net should it lose the next presidential election.
Liu Ching-yi is a professor at National Taiwan University’s College of Social Sciences.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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