An election of conveners for various committees in the Legislative Yuan was aborted yesterday after the breakdown of an agreement reached on the allocation of the number of conveners for each party.
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), along with the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), People First Party (PFP), Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) and the Non-partisan Alliance, agreed in a consultation on Tuesday night that the allocation of seats would be roughly in proportion to the number of seats held by the various parties in the 223-seat legislature.
This would have given a convener allocation of 12 for the DPP, 10 for the KMT, eight for the PFP and three each for the TSU and the Non-partisan Alliance. There are three conveners for each of the 12 committees in the legislature.
However, the caucuses of the Non-partisan Alliance and the TSU withdrew their consent yesterday, which resulted in an angry reaction from the KMT and the PFP.
The TSU demanded that the conveners of the "hotter" committees, such as those concerned with budget, the economy, health and the environment, be appointed on a rotational basis.
Lee Chia-chin (李嘉進), KMT caucus whip in the legislature, said that the KMT and the PFP had already made repeated concessions, but still the DPP and other parties are not satisfied. He accused the DPP of being "the hand manipulating the withdrawal of consent."
Chou Hsi-wei (
Legislative Yuan President Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) held three consultations with the legislators yesterday, to no avail.
The KMT and the PFP said they would not consider voting to select the conveners; while the DPP, the TSU and the Non-partisan Alliance said they would not rule out voting according to procedural rules.
After the collapse of more consultations, Wang declared that the result of the consultation is legally binding, and all parties should respect the results.
He said he would restart the consultation process on Monday and would put today's election of committee conveners on the agenda of a floor meeting scheduled for Tuesday so as not to affect the committees' work.
"The current rule of three conveners in each legislative committee is so unique that we could not find a similar case in any other country," he said.
"The three-convener rule revealed not only the problem of political parties bargaining the convenership by private negotiations, but also means that even a junior legislator would have a chance to win the convenership election by canvassing for votes," Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Tuan Yi-kang (段宜康) said.
Tuan believed that the conveners of each legislative committee should be reduced to one from the current three, and that the convenership tenure needs to be extended to complete time-consuming legislation.
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