The longest legislative session since 2012 finally ended yesterday. The sessions are generally held from February to May and September to December, but this year the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) wielded their opposition majority to extend it twice — first in April, pushing it to July 31, and in June, extending it to yesterday.
Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜) said the legislature passed 77 major resolutions, including special budget bills on Friday for relief and reconstruction in the aftermath of Typhoon Danas and extensive flooding. It also on Friday passed a flurry of bills, including the Cabinet’s supplementary budget proposal, with only minor cuts, as well as revisions to the Special Act for Strengthening Economic, Social and National Security Resilience in Response to International Circumstances (因應國際情勢強化經濟社會及國土安全韌性特別條例) , which includes a public cash handout. The Cabinet also agreed to allocate a supplementary general grant to local governments immediately.
Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) on Friday thanked the lawmakers and said the Cabinet-legislature interaction over the past day was a good start for the new legislative session, which begins today.
Han said he hoped the ruling and opposition parties could put aside their differences and work together, bringing the session to close on a seemingly friendly note. That is to be applauded, especially considering the antagonism between the Cabinet and the legislature, and between the ruling and opposition parties, played out in endless skirmishes and clashes, which led to Democratic Progressive Party lawmakers backing the mass recall movement this summer.
Although the extended session enabled lawmakers to pass typhoon and flooding recovery bills, the natural disasters were unforeseeable when the KMT and TPP extended the session, and their reasons for extending it are still questionable. As of June 1, a day after a typical session would end, lawmakers had only passed 15 law bills in three months — the fewest ever; the second-fewest was 31 bills in the previous session, which was also extended by 21 days by the same legislators.
At the beginning of this year’s session, KMT legislators pledged to deal with bread-and-butter issues, but they failed to do so by the end of May. Their claimed contribution of passing the special resilience act to mitigate the effects of the new US tariff and a special budget for flood recovery are only justifiable in hindsight. Moreover, many committee and plenary meetings were short — such as four consecutive plenary meetings in July that lasted 27 minutes on average — with low attendance rates and an abnormally high number of trips (112 trips between June and Aug. 21), stirring speculation over the KMT’s and the TPP’s motives to extend the session.
The legislative recess is intended to give lawmakers time to visit their local constituencies, listen to public opinion, study and discuss policies with experts, consult with civic groups and carefully draft bills. However, a prolonged legislative session that ended with the passage of a slew of bills on the last day highlights the legislature’s inefficiency. The extensions robbed lawmakers of time to reflect and come up with more thoughtful bills that address people’s needs. KMT Legislator Weng Hsiao-ling’s (翁曉玲) out-of-the-blue proposal to ban all renewable energy equipment, including solar panels, in national parks, or KMT Legislator Chen Yu-jen’s (陳玉珍) casual suggestion to store nuclear waste on Kinmen County’s uninhabited Erdan Island (二膽) — only to quickly backpedal following a strong backlash — are just examples of how sloppy and unprofessional lawmakers could be when they do not take the time to carefully study their own proposals.
Hopefully, the new legislative session would be as Han and Cho hoped — a show of mutual respect, with friendly and rational discussions, in which lawmakers truly come together to address the challenges facing Taiwan.
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