Proposals for legislative reform top lists of worst-stalled bills this legislative term, legislative watchdog Citizen Congress Watch (CCW) said yesterday.
The group unveiled a list ranking bills based on the number of times they have been voted down or rejected this legislative term, with the top four places held by bills aimed at reforming the legislature’s Procedure Committee. Each of the four bills has been rejected by the committee 68 times so far this legislative term.
CCW executive director Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) said that passing clear rules limiting the power of the committee was important because it regularly overreaches its legal prerogatives.
“The Procedure Committee should just be a depository for official documents,” he said. “It should just conduct procedural confirmation and allocation — not kill bills because they are opposed by its members.”
“If a bill gets stopped by the Procedure Committee, the sponsoring member’s motion, documents and bill is not be placed on the Legislative Yuan public announcement system, meaning that there is no way for the people to know what their version looked like,” he added.
Chang said the majority Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) might be relying on the Procedure Committees to maintain control over which bills are discussed and voted on in regular committees, adding that the party also often votes bills down during their first reading to prevent them from being sent on to regular committees.
Regular legislative committees have rotating chairs from both the KMT and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), giving both parties the right to hold hearings and call committee votes on bills that pass out of the Procedure Committee and are reviewed to them by the Legislative Yuan as a whole.
The group said that other reform bills which have been bottled up this session include bills allowing the public to listen in on a committee hearing, as well as bills requiring additional transparency in “cross-caucus negotiations” used to facilitate the passage of controversial bills.
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:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
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Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching