The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus yesterday said it would set up a team to review President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) nominations for presidents and members of the Control Yuan and Examination Yuan, adding that it would decide whether to enforce party discipline on the approval vote after the review is completed.
KMT deputy caucus whip Wang Ting-son (王廷升) said the party caucus would appoint a 21-member team to conduct the review, with Legislator Lu Hsueh-chang (呂學樟), who convenes the legislature’s Judiciary and Organic Laws and Statutes Committee, as its convener.
Lu said that so far there have been few disagreements about the Examination Yuan nominations, “but there is plenty of noise surrounding those for the Control Yuan.”
Photo: CNA
Questions would be prepared for the nominees to gauge their expertise and understanding of their work, Lu said.
“We do not want another [Control Yuan President] Wang Chien-shien (王建煊), who made remarks about the abolishment of the institution and once called all the Control Yuan members before him ‘bastards,’” Lu said.
“How do you expect people to respect your job if you don’t respect it yourself?” he said.
Responding to the Democratic Progressive Party’s proposal to scrap the institution, Lu said that at least 97 countries have emulated the nation’s ombudsman system, “a fact that shows the institution should be valued.”
“It would also be extremely difficult to see the proposal pass the legislature, as it amounts to a change to the Constitution and would require approval from three-quarters of lawmakers,” he added.
When asked about the news that KMT lawmakers are urging the party caucus not to issue orders on how the ballots should be cast in the upcoming approval vote for the nominees of the Control and Examination branches, party caucus whip Lin Hung-chih (林鴻池) said it is too early to make that decision.
“The review process has not even begun and [fellow KMT legislators] probably still know very little about the nominees,” he said.
“We will not know whether they are qualified until the review has been completed,” Lin said, adding that the review results would still need to be approved by the party caucus.
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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