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Caucuses debate extra sessions for donation bill

The legislative caucuses are slated to negotiate this morning over extra sittings to pass a bill governing political donations (政治獻金法), after the pan-blue and green camps blamed each other yesterday for the delay in passing the bill.

All the caucuses had promised to pass the bill before today but it is still unknown when, or even if, extra sittings will be held.

The pan-blue and pan-green camps have both voiced support for extra sittings but accused the other of obstruction.

"We hope negotiations will result in extra sittings on March 10 and March 11 to pass the bill, and the president can promulgate the law before the election so that the donations contributed to this election can be made trans-parent," said Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Lo Wen-chia (羅文嘉).

To refute accusations that it was the green camp who tried to delay passage of the bill, Lo said the DPP caucus had written to Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平) on Feb. 17 and March 2 to request extra sittings to deal with the bill.

For its part, the pan-blue camp insisted that it was not the one that had not tried to interfere with legislative passage of the bill.

"When we had cross-party negotiations in late February to deal with the draft bill, we proposed holding extra sittings while the Taiwan Solidarity Union [TSU] objected to the proposal and the DPP whip Ker Chien-ming (柯建銘) did not say anything," KMT caucus leader Liao Feng-te (廖風德) said.

TSU caucus leader Chen Chien-ming (陳建銘), however, refuted Liao's accusation.

Chen Chien-ming said that the TSU had only objected to extra sittings because the KMT wanted to bundle the donation bill together with a resolution about the two questions for the March.20 referendum. Chen said the TSU wanted to concentrate on the donation bill.
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