A consensus on constitutional amendments that would marginalize the National Assembly beginning May 20 was reached by the KMT and the DPP yesterday.
The deal would entail most of the functions of the Assembly being transferred to the Legislative Yuan.
Under the agreement, the Assembly would retain the power to propose the impeachment of the president and vice president, and vote on constitutional amendments. In both cases however, the initial proposals would have to be submitted by the Legislative Yuan.
PHOTO: CHIANG YING-YING, TAIPEI TIMES
"From May 20, the National Assembly will maintain its title, but become a nominal, non-standing body," said Hong Yuh-chin (
KMT and DPP representatives agreed that deputies would be elected to the Assembly by proportional representation three months after an impeachment or constitutional reform is proposed.
The Assembly would meet for no more than one month on each occasion and would be disbanded as soon as the purpose of that meeting had been achieved.
How many deputies will be selected to serve the Assembly has not yet been decided.
Functions transferred to the Legislative Yuan include the right to elect the vice president when the office is vacant; initiating a proposal to recall the president or vice president; confirming Judicial Yuan, Examination Yuan and Control Yuan appointments after they have been forwarded by the president; and boundary changes.
After the reforms are made, the president will deliver his annual state-of-the-nation report to the Legislative Yuan, instead of the Assembly.
The Assembly will no longer have the power to initiate proposed amendments to the Constitution.
Both parties decided that an extraordinary National Assembly session will be convened by April 11 to process the reform, setting their sights on completing the amendments before the upcoming Assembly elections on May 6.
Chen Chin-te (陳金德), director-general of the DPP's caucus in the Assembly, said the DPP and KMT caucuses expected to push through the proposed amendments for a second reading by April 25, in order to finalize the amendments after a third reading and meet the May 6 deadline.
In future elections for the Assembly, Chen explained, the electorate would vote for a political party, as normal. This vote share would correspond with the number of deputies in the Assembly.
"Prospects for the reforms are very optimistic," Chen said, "But we have to race against time and each party needs to spend some time mobilizing its deputies to throw their support behind this."
Chen said the agreement, which took only three hours of negotiations, is consistent with public expectations.
Chen added the proposals should have no problem winning the support of the New Party, since they are very close to its stance of "maintaining the Assembly but not the deputies."
In response, New Party caucus leaders said they were pleased with the KMT's and DPP's moves to reform the Assembly, but felt there were still points that needed fine tuning.
Wang Kao-cheng (王高成), spoke-sman for the New Party caucus, said his party supported "freezing" the Assembly and said it was unnecessary for the Assembly to maintain any function at all.
"The power of referendum should be exercised by the people directly, so there is no need to waste any social costs on electing National Assembly deputies," Wang said.
However, Wang said his caucus would be flexible, for the present, so as not to upset the nation's political stability.
In addition, the New Party proposes expanding the existing conditions for impeaching the president to include "corruption and other irregularities."
The nation’s fastest supercomputer, Nano 4 (晶創26), is scheduled to be launched in the third quarter, and would be used to train large language models in finance and national defense sectors, the National Center for High-Performance Computing (NCHC) said. The supercomputer, which would operate at about 86.05 petaflops, is being tested at a new cloud computing center in the Southern Taiwan Science Park in Tainan. The exterior of the server cabinet features chip circuitry patterns overlaid with a map of Taiwan, highlighting the nation’s central position in the semiconductor industry. The center also houses Taiwania 2, Taiwania 3, Forerunner 1 and
FIRST TRIAL: Ko’s lawyers sought reduced bail and other concessions, as did other defendants, but the bail judge denied their requests, citing the severity of the sentences Former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) was yesterday sentenced to 17 years in prison and had his civil rights suspended for six years over corruption, embezzlement and other charges. Taipei prosecutors in December last year asked the Taipei District Court for a combined 28-year, six-month sentence for the four cases against Ko, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP). The cases were linked to the Core Pacific City (京華城購物中心) redevelopment project and the mismanagement of political donations. Other defendants convicted on separate charges included Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Angela Ying (應曉薇), who was handed a 15-year, six-month sentence; Core Pacific
J-6 REMODEL: The converted drones are part of Beijing’s expanding mix of airpower weapons, including bombers with stand-off missiles and UAV swarms, the report said China has stationed obsolete supersonic fighters converted to attack drones at six air bases close to the Taiwan Strait, a report published this month by the Arlington, Virginia-based Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies said. Satellite imagery of the airfields from the institute’s “China Airpower Tracker” shows what appear to be lines of stubby, swept-winged aircraft matching the shape of J-6 fighters that first flew with the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force in the 1960s. Since their conversion to drones, the aircraft have been identified at five bases in China’s Fujian Province and one in Guangdong Province, the report said. J.
China used fake LinkedIn profiles to harvest sensitive data from NATO and EU institutions by soliciting information from staff, a European security source said on Friday. The operation, allegedly orchestrated by the Chinese Ministry of State Security, targeted dozens of employees at the military alliance or EU organizations through fictitious accounts, the source said, confirming reports in French and Belgian media. Posing as recruiters on the online professional networking platform, Chinese spies would initially request paid reports before later soliciting non-public or even classified information. One particularly active fake profile used the name “Kevin Zhang,” claiming to be the head
RSS