Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou (
"Overturning some of the articles of the Referendum Law will cause a fissure in the legal system and impact the completeness of the law," Ma said yesterday at a press conference held after the weekly closed-door Cabinet meeting, which he attends.
During yesterday's meeting the Cabinet decided to overturn 12 articles of the law.
"I think the Cabinet should overturn the whole thing or it should wait until President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) announces the law and then seek to amend it," Ma said.
The Cabinet wants to overturn the clause empowering the legislature to initiate a national referendum and those clauses relating to the establishment and responsibilities of a referendum supervisory committee.
The Cabinet said the article allowing the legislature to initiate a referendum should be annulled because it expands the legislature's power.
It wants the supervisory committee to be abolished, arguing that its functions would overlap with those of the Central Election Commission.
Ma said if the committee was abolished and the legislature was deprived of the right of initiative, it would create "a vacuum period" for a referendum.
"There's no organization to review the topics for a referendum and there would be no mechanism to check on the result. No one will know how to handle the result," he said.
"That would mean that only the president would have the right to propose his defensive referendum, which is far from the true spirit of a referendum law," Ma said.
He suggested the Cabinet and the legislature try to negotiate their differences over the law in order to avoid another showdown between the pan-blue and pan-green camps.
Cabinet Spokesman Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) told the same press conference that the government had to act because it considers certain articles in the law hard to implement.
"Only the person wearing a pair of shoes knows whether they are good shoes or not -- and we're the ones wearing the shoes," Lin quoted Premier Yu Shyi-kun as saying.
"It would be irresponsible for us not to file a motion to overturn part of the legislation because we're the government agency that has to enforce the law," Lin quoted Yu as saying.
Minister without Portfolio Hsu Chih-hsiung (許志雄), who was assigned by Yu to study the legislation, said that the law not only has many flaws and would be hard to implement, it is unconstitutional.
"If we succeeded in overturning the entire legislation, we would have to go back to where we started, that is, we wouldn't have any referendum law at all," he said.
Echoing Hsu, Kaohsiung Mayor Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said that the definition of "hard to implement" legislation is subjective but the public should respect the Cabinet's judgment, since it is the body that carries out the law.
Mainland Affairs Council Chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that Ma shouldn't worry about the elimination of the referendum supervisory committee because the Central Election Commission could do the job and is politically neutral.
Chairwoman of the Overseas Chinese Affairs Commission Chang Fu-mei (張富美) said that if Ma is willing to see the law amended, he should use his political connections to convince opposition lawmakers amend it.
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