Legislative Yuan braces itself for combative session

The Legislative Yuan will convene a new session on Friday, with feuding over the approaching presidential election expected to overwhelm the chamber.

"Despite a number of significant financial bills waiting to be cleared from the legislative floor in the new session, I have slim hopes of seeing the Legislative Yuan pass these bills before the presidential election," said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Chiu Tai-san (邱太三) yesterday.

Chiu, who represents the DPP on numerous cross-party negotiations on financial-reform bills, predicted that his pan-blue counterparts would be more reluctant to take part in similar discussions on the eve of the presidential vote.

He said that opposition caucuses members had shown no interest in turning up for previous negotiations and they probably would have no time to join in those due to be held this session.

A pledge by the leaders of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party (PFP) caucuses last week to block the defensive referendum declared by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and pursue a legislative resolution instead in some respects proved Chiu's prediction.

Lawmakers agreed to start the new session in February after Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) members came out against any break before the election.

Although the session will begin on schedule, legislative leaders were still undecided whether there would be a weeklong suspension one week before the presidential election.

Leaders were also unable to come to a conclusion on whether to put aside an interpellation procedure to Premier Yu Shyi-kun this session to speed up the passage of a number of bills held up in the legislative process.

One of the stalemated bills was a statute related to the government's proposed 10 major construction projects. The pan-blue-dominated legislature deferred the draft bill by vetoing the DPP's motion of holding a special session before the Lunar New Year.

The KMT and PFP caucuses said that the proposed session would be unnecessary because lawmakers voted to reconvene the session three weeks before the original date of Feb. 24.

Urging lawmakers to skip the time-consuming interpellation, Yu said last week that it was a "waste of time for the electorate when lawmakers convene the session three weeks earlier just for fulfilling a pointless question-and-answer step."

But KMT whip Liao Fung-te (廖風德) warned yesterday that "the KMT held that all bills, including the construction-project plan, should be advanced in accordance with legislative procedure."

The DPP could file a motion to hold an extra session to tackle the bills alongside the regular session dealing with an interpellation with the premier if the administration really wanted to accelerate passage of bills they had earmarked, Liao said.