During the party-state era, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) controlled the media. It would portray the dangwai (黨外, “outside the party”) movement as violent disruptors and emphasize conflict in the legislature, saddling the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) with the unfair label of the “party of violence” for several decades.
Today, we are seeing images of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Chen Yu-jen (陳玉珍), sporting a hard hat on her head and shoes with steel-toe caps on her feet charging to the legislative podium in an egregious display of violence. It is not for nothing that she has been called the “Kinmen tank.”
It was because the party-state media would only broadcast the “violent behavior” of the dangwai movement that the latter had to adopt this policy, to get some exposure for itself and get the information out past the media controls. Now, the KMT is exploiting the very democracy that the “outside the party” movement and the DPP had fought so hard for, in a premeditated use of violence, despite having a clear legislative majority. The KMT is the true “party of violence.”
It is not that the three amendments proposed by the opposition parties, involving the Public Officials Election and Recall Act (公職人員選舉罷免法) and the allocation of public finances, cannot be discussed. There is a reason that elected officials in democratic countries enjoy guaranteed terms of office, and Republic of China (ROC) founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) believed that it was best to have a facility for recall.
Political scientists are divided on the issue, but they are not averse to the idea of setting the threshold for recall high.
However, laws must have logical rigor. There is consensus among the public on the need for the right to recall, and the KMT says that it is the heir of Sun, and yet it seeks to nullify the power of recall.
The allocation of public finances would impact how the nation is run for several decades. It is true that, in the past, many people, including the DPP pioneers, believed that the excessive concentration of money in the center was unfair to localities around the country, leading to the situation in which local governments became reliant on central government subsidies.
However, how public finances are allocated would affect the whole country, and amendments should take into consideration the experience of other countries, refer to expert opinions and even be passed through simulations before they proceed.
Instead, the KMT has left it to a spurious discussion among a small number of people, and then passed it by a show of hands.
An even more curious “innovation” is the prescribed number of Constitutional Court judges to reach an agreement in the opposition’s amendments to the Constitutional Court Procedure Act (憲法訴訟法). In the US, nine judges sit on the Supreme Court, and a minimum of six must be present for a decision to be handed down, and this can be passed by a relative majority of four judges.
The opposition parties combined form a legislative majority, and there are seven vacancies on the Constitutional Court. In Western democracies, a rational approach would be for the opposition to force the government to allow it to nominate persons amenable to their own position to half of the vacant places.
Instead, the KMT-led opposition would prefer to hobble the court: No wonder people suspect that it is simply trying to put a spanner in the works.
Nobody is being fooled by what the KMT is doing. It is not only DPP supporters that are enraged, even swing voters disagree with the chaos. This is why President William Lai’s (賴清德) approval ratings are increasing, stabilizing at about 50 percent, higher than the percentage of votes he won during the presidential election.
Of course, the DPP needs to look into itself and ask why it lost so many legislative seats, but Taiwanese voted for the opposition in the hope that it would introduce policies that would benefit the country, not to settle political scores and bring the nation to the brink of a constitutional crisis. If the KMT believes that the Constitution is a joke, then it is most welcome to abolish the ROC Constitution entirely and write a new one. The DPP would be sure to cooperate, and there is little doubt they would secure the two-thirds threshold needed for constitutional amendments.
Tommy Lin is chairman of the Formosa Republican Association and director of the Taiwan United Nations Alliance.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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