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.
China has reserved offshore airspace in the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported yesterday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. These alerts, known as Notice to Air Missions (Notams), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert is
NAMING SPAT: The foreign ministry called on Denmark to propose an acceptable solution to the erroneous nationality used for Taiwanese on residence permits Taiwan has revoked some privileges for Danish diplomatic staff over a Danish permit that lists “Taiwan” as “China,” Eric Huang (黃鈞耀), head of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Department of European Affairs, told a news conference in Taipei yesterday. Reporters asked Huang whether the Danish government had responded to the ministry’s request that it correct the nationality on Danish residence permits of Taiwanese, which has been listed as “China” since 2024. Taiwan’s representative office in Denmark continues to communicate with the Danish government, and the ministry has revoked some privileges previously granted to Danish representatives in Taiwan and would continue to review
More than 6,000 Taiwanese students have participated in exchange programs in China over the past two years, despite the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) “orange light” travel advisory, government records showed. The MAC’s publicly available registry showed that Taiwanese college and university students who went on exchange programs across the Strait numbered 3,592 and 2,966 people respectively. The National Immigration Agency data revealed that 2,296 and 2,551 Chinese students visited Taiwan for study in the same two years. A review of the Web sites of publicly-run universities and colleges showed that Taiwanese higher education institutions continued to recruit students for Chinese educational programs without
China has reserved offshore airspace over the Yellow Sea and East China Sea from March 27 to May 6, issuing alerts that are usually used to warn of military exercises, although no such exercises have been announced, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Sunday. Reserving such a large area for 40 days without explanation is an “unusual step,” as military exercises normally only last a few days, the paper said. The alerts, known as notice to air missions (NOTAMs), “are intended to inform pilots and aviation authorities of temporary airspace hazards or restrictions,” the article said. The airspace reserved in the alert
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