Due to opposition from the pan-blue alliance, the special arms procurement bill failed to pass the legislature's Procedure Committee yesterday, the first attempt after the government adjusted the budget ceiling downward to NT$480 billion.
Also failing to pass the committee were five bills proposed by the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) legislative caucus.
They are the anti-invasion peace bill (
TSU caucus whip Lo Chih-ming (
However, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus asked him to drop the proposal, taking into consideration the numerical disadvantage of the pan-green camp, Lo said.
People First Party (PFP) Legislator Lee Yung-ping (
"The referendum held in tandem with the presidential election last year vetoed the question that the nation should beef up its missile defense in the face of Chinese ballistic missile deployments," she said. "While the DPP government should have respected the decision of the people, it has apparently turned a deaf ear to it."
Lee said that her caucus has never opposed the arms procurement plan. What they oppose instead is an arms budget that is outrageously costly and earmarked as a special budget to circumvent the Budget Law (
Although the cost of the arms budget stipulated in the bill had been adjusted downward, Lee said that the budget is still designated as "special" and the price of the weapons systems is still disgracefully expensive.
"It is nothing but old wine stored in a new bottle," she said.
Echoing Lee's opinion, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Chen Chieh (
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) caucus whip Lai Ching-teh (
"While the duty of the Procedure Committee is to set the agenda for the plenary session, it has instead usurped the job of the legislative committees to debate a bill," Lai said.
Meanwhile, cross-party negotiations conducted to discuss the formation of a second investigation committee of the election-eve assassination attempt and a second legislative resolution to counter China's "Anti-Secession" Law fell flat yesterday.
The DPP caucus argued that the March 19 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee Statute (
The KMT caucus, however, said that the establishment of the committee can be concurrent with legal revisions.
While the pan-blue camp is willing to revamp the disputed articles, KMT Legislator Tseng Yung-chuan (
DPP caucus whip Chao Yung-ching (
An essay competition jointly organized by a local writing society and a publisher affiliated with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) might have contravened the Act Governing Relations Between the People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area (臺灣地區與大陸地區人民關係條例), the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) said on Thursday. “In this case, the partner organization is clearly an agency under the CCP’s Fujian Provincial Committee,” MAC Deputy Minister and spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh (梁文傑) said at a news briefing in Taipei. “It also involves bringing Taiwanese students to China with all-expenses-paid arrangements to attend award ceremonies and camps,” Liang said. Those two “characteristics” are typically sufficient
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The brilliant blue waters, thick foliage and bucolic atmosphere on this seemingly idyllic archipelago deep in the Pacific Ocean belie the key role it now plays in a titanic geopolitical struggle. Palau is again on the front line as China, and the US and its allies prepare their forces in an intensifying contest for control over the Asia-Pacific region. The democratic nation of just 17,000 people hosts US-controlled airstrips and soon-to-be-completed radar installations that the US military describes as “critical” to monitoring vast swathes of water and airspace. It is also a key piece of the second island chain, a string of
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