Accusing Citizens Congress Watch (CCW) of bias in reviewing the performance of lawmakers, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislative caucus passed a resolution on Friday asking its members not to provide any information to the group.
After holding a meeting with more than 100 people from different walks of life to evaluate legislators at the end of last year, the CCW released last week its ranking of lawmakers in each of the eight legislative committees based on their performance.
However, a majority of KMT lawmakers — notably Chiu Yi (邱毅) and Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) — were not happy about the scores they received.
This was despite the fact that 17 of the 24 top-three ranking legislators in the eight committees are affiliated with the KMT.
Hung and Chiu received the lowest ranking in each of their committees, but Chiu moved up a few rankings after the CCW discovered a mistake in calculating his score.
To boycott the CCW, the KMT legislative caucus has prohibited its members from sending information to the group for the next review.
“We adopted the resolution last Friday, because most members [of the caucus] felt that the CCW is a biased group,” KMT caucus secretary-general Chang Shuo-wen (張碩文) said.
“We legislators are elected by constituents in our electoral districts, we answer to their needs and listen to them, we don’t need to listen to the CCW,” Chang said.
“In fact, it’s not possible for us to reply to every group that asks information from us, that’s not our job,” he said.
Chang said that the caucus would also take legal action against the CCW, “if it makes any untrue statements about us again.”
Upon hearing the news, CCW executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) slammed the move as “taking a step backward in democracy.”
“We didn’t just make up the scores — we invited more than 100 citizens to assess the lawmakers’ performance based on their attendance record, number of bill proposals or whether they were engaged in inappropriate behavior,” Ho said yesterday.
“In fact, 70 percent of the lawmakers who received the top-three rankings are affiliated with the KMT,” Ho said.
He said KMT lawmakers who performed well have expressed their appreciation and support for the group.
It’s unfair to them and it’s anti-democratic to arbitrarily prohibit individual legislators from showing their good work to the CCW, Ho said.
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