Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Ma Ying-jeou (
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislator-at-large Chang Chung-hsiung (
Chang urged Ma to halt the recall motion and asked Ma to help cool down pan-blue lawmakers in order to stop disturbing the country's constitutional development.
PHOTO: WANG MIN-WEI, TAIPEI TIMES
"Ma has always stood on the wrong side in the course of Taiwan's constitutional development, and he has done so during this recall motion as well," Chang said at a press conference yesterday.
Chang said that Ma had intentionally turned a legal case into a political issue for his personal gain, which has destabilized the nation's political and economic environment.
"The pan-blue camp, which has abused its majority to push the recall of the president, is the origin of constitutional disorder," Chang said.
Chang claimed that it was hard to find a similar case to that of Taiwan's in other countries, and expressed his belief that a misuse of the legislature's right to recall the president would cause constitutional chaos and political unrest. He also suggested that the legislators look to historical precedents as reference points.
Citing a landslide vote in 1954 of the National Assembly to recall then-Vice President Lee Chung-jen (李宗仁), Chang said that Lee was unseated because of his alleged involvement in several unlawful deeds, including embezzlement, and a long stay in the US.
In the US, the impeachments of Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton during their presidential tenures were also grounded on "concrete evidence" that showed their illegal conduct, Chang said. He said that it is "not possible for Ma" -- who has a Harvard law degree and has served as minister of justice -- not to know the conditions for initiating a recall of the head of state, which is that the person has to have been proved to have done something illegal.
"I urge Ma, who earned a degree of Doctor of Jurisprudence from Harvard University, to think twice and take the country's long-term stability into account," Chang said.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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