The passage late on Wednesday night of the Forward-looking Infrastructure Development Program budget was achieved by unconstitutionally distorting legislative rules, members of a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT)-affiliated think tank said yesterday, adding that Legislative Yuan Speaker Su Jia-chyuan (蘇嘉全) set a dangerous precedent for handling opposition motions.
“Their actions amounted to blocking off our ability to propose amendments and hold the government accountable, effectively announcing that the Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] will do what it pleases in the Legislative Yuan in the future,” KMT Legislator Johnny Chiang (江啟臣) said at a National Policy Foundation news conference.
Chiang accused Su of using “majority violence” to back up a Tuesday night announcement that no issue would be voted on twice.
Chiang slammed the speaker’s interpretation of procedural rule, saying that it relied on a set of rules of order for civic organizations promulgated by the Ministry of the Interior, rather than on the Legislative Yuan’s own rules of order.
The KMT caucus has said that the interpretation was to ensure that only DPP-sponsored amendments would be considered by effectively precluding rival opposition amendments on the same issue from being discussed.
“There is a passage about not voting on the same issue twice in official legislature rules, but what it refers to is not voting on any identical measure twice,” former Taipei Law and Regulations Commission chairman Ye Ching-yuan (葉慶元) said.
More than 2,500 votes on the budget were held over the past several days, a record for the Legislative Yuan, after the KMT proposed thousands of amendments and motions in a “procedural boycott” of the special budget that it has criticized as wasteful and unfairly targeting localities controlled by the DPP.
“This amounts to the DPP poking a hole in a legal boycott method,” KMT Legislator Chiang Wan-an (蔣萬安) said, blasting the DPP for using “tank-like” procedural moves to push the budget through.
He recommends that the party caucus seek a constitutional ruling, Chiang said.
“Put simply, the threat of massive numbers of amendments allows us to use time to win space,” he said, adding that party caucuses had maintained continual backroom negotiations throughout the legislative battle of the past several days.
“The DPP is under time pressure and if we do not have this kind of a tool in the future, what incentive will they have to negotiate with us?” he added.
Amendments should have been lined up for consideration based on the degree they diverged from the original proposal, rather than the time at which they were submitted, Chiang said.
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