The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) yesterday vowed to keep pushing for an investigation into President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and Premier Jiang Yi-huah’s (江宜樺) role in the current political strife, but appeared to remain uncertain on its next step forward after its no-confidence motion against the Cabinet failed on Friday.
The party’s weekly Central Standing Committee yesterday said that positive action should be taken to seek the abolishment of the Special Investigation Division (SID) of the Supreme Prosecutors’ Office, the truth behind the division’s wiretaps on the legislature and the establishment of an investigative committee in the Legislative Yuan, DPP spokesperson Lin Chun-hsien (林俊憲) said.
Ma and Jiang should be held accountable for their involvement in the improper wiretaps, Lin added.
With the media and supporters’ attention focused on the DPP’s next move and internal conflict over its strategy, the party cautiously discussed the issue yesterday.
Despite its spokesperson reiterating that the DPP did not rule out follow-up measures, Lin said the meeting neither discussed whether the party would initiate a recall or impeachment bid against Ma nor whether it would end the boycott of the premier’s report to the legislature tomorrow.
Lin said the headquarters would leave the decision on Jiang’s report to the caucus, which is to go over the issue at a caucus meeting this morning.
Senior party members refused to call the motion a complete failure, but acknowledged that the DPP could have done better.
Former premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said the party, which was aware all along that the motion was unlikely to pass, did not formulate a clear strategic goal.
“If it turns out that none of the trio of Ma, Jiang and Prosecutor-General Huang Shih-ming (黃世銘) steps down, I would call it a failure, but this political event is still developing,” Hsieh said.
Former premier Yu Shyi-kun said the DPP had done the right thing because more than half of the public supported the motion.
Most senior DPP members agreed on one thing — the misrepresentation of the public’s voice is a serious flaw of representative democracy in Taiwan as Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers chose to side with Ma rather than the people.
DPP Chairman Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) has assigned the constitution study panel under the DPP think tank to study the feasibility of a Constitution amendment initiative.
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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