Standing behind a 21cm stack of more than 2,000 legislative proposals weighing 15kg, Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) executive director Ho Tsung-hsun (何宗勳) criticized the legislature yesterday for delaying review of the proposals until the last three days of this legislative session.
“Suppose the lawmakers take exactly 10 minutes to review each proposal in this pile of papers in front of me. It would take them 19 sleepless days to finish reviewing all of them, but they’re trying to do it within three days” Ho said at a news conference at the group’s office yesterday.
While the legislature had close to five months between the start of the session in September and the end of the session on Tuesday to review bills and central government budgets for the next fiscal year, it waited until the last three days to begin the process.
“[The lawmakers] are certainly inefficient, unprofessional and lazy,” Ho said.
Chen Chien-fu (陳建甫), a CCW board member, accused the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) of not serving as a watchdog for the public.
“With an absolute majority, the KMT passes everything that the government proposes — this is not what their job is about,” Chen said. “As lawmakers belonging to the ruling party, they should be very careful about proposals and bills submitted by the government.”
Ho, on the other hand, thinks that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is not working hard enough as opposition.
“The DPP is a minority, but this is no excuse,” Ho said at the news conference. “If they went after inappropriate legislative proposals like they did [former KMT legislator] Diane Lee’s [李慶安] dual citizenship case, things would have been a lot better, and they would have won applause from the public.”
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
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
A magnitude 5.9 earthquake that struck about 33km off the coast of Hualien City was the "main shock" in a series of quakes in the area, with aftershocks expected over the next three days, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said yesterday. Prior to the magnitude 5.9 quake shaking most of Taiwan at 6:53pm yesterday, six other earthquakes stronger than a magnitude of 4, starting with a magnitude 5.5 quake at 6:09pm, occurred in the area. CWA Seismological Center Director Wu Chien-fu (吳健富) confirmed that the quakes were all part of the same series and that the magnitude 5.5 temblor was
The Central Weather Administration has issued a heat alert for southeastern Taiwan, warning of temperatures as high as 36°C today, while alerting some coastal areas of strong winds later in the day. Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門) and Pingtung County’s Neipu Township (內埔) are under an orange heat alert, which warns of temperatures as high as 36°C for three consecutive days, the CWA said, citing southwest winds. The heat would also extend to Tainan’s Nansi (楠西) and Yujing (玉井) districts, as well as Pingtung’s Gaoshu (高樹), Yanpu (鹽埔) and Majia (瑪家) townships, it said, forecasting highs of up to 36°C in those areas
RSS