The threshold for passing constitutional reform at the legislature needs to be lowered, an academic said.
Hsu Wei-chun (徐偉群), an associate professor at Chung Yuan Christian University’s Department of Financial and Economic Law and also a member of the Citizens’ Constitutional Reform Advocacy Alliance, said that lowering the “unreasonably high” threshold for constitutional reform should be the first step for implementing reform, urging the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to support legislation encouraging public participation in constitutional reform.
President-elect Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) proposed a plan to carry out constitutional reforms “in two stages,” but the legislature’s attempt to carry out the first stage of the reforms failed with the DPP and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) failing to reach a consensus.
Although the two parties agreed to lower the voting age from 20 to 18 and lower the threshold for political parties to have at-large representation from at least 5 percent of at-large votes to 3 percent, the DPP and the KMT failed to reach a consensus at the end, as the KMT insisted on restoring the legislature’s power to vote on the president’s nominee for premier and adding clauses to absentee voting in the Constitution.
Hsu said that it is difficult to amend the Constitution because of the high threshold that an amendment needs to pass.
According to the Constitution, a constitutional amendment must be backed by the signatures of a quarter of lawmakers and it must be supported by three quarters of the attending lawmakers in a meeting in which at least three quarters of the total lawmakers took part.
After the legislature passes a constitutional amendment, it must then garner the support of 50 percent of eligible voters in a referendum to take effect.
Given the high threshold, it is only possible to pass a constitutional amendment when a referendum is held on the same day as a nationwide election, and thus there must be a campaign to raise public awareness and reach public consensus on the constitutional reform issue before the 2018 local elections to implement a constitutional reform, Hsu said.
Hsu said that the alliance would lobby for an amendment that would include the public’s participation in constitutional reform and organize public conferences to raise awareness on constitutional reform and promote referendum on constitutional amendments.
Another alliance member, Lai Chung-chiang (賴中強), said that Tsai promised to push for a complete reform of the Constitution during her campaign, so he hopes that the new legislature might respond to the call for reforms.
Lai called on the DPP to support the alliance’s bill for public participation in constitutional reforms, so that the proposals might pass legislative review and are voted on in a referendum in 2018 along with local elections.
The DPP must deliver on its promise to push for constitutional reforms that it made during the presidential and legislative elections, and should not use the high threshold as an excuse to betray public expectations, Lai added.
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