Lawmakers should not drop their official duties to campaign ahead of the January presidential and legislative elections, Citizen’s Congress Watch (CCW) said yesterday as it released its “prophecies” about lawmakers’ conduct over the next few months.
Based on previous election campaigns, the group said that the Legislative Yuan was likely to be “deserted” during the new session that opens next week, the session would end early, review of the government’s budget would be perfunctory, controversial “pork barrel” legislation would be passed and legislators would misuse their expense accounts to subsidize their campaigns.
“Just as monks have to ring their daily quota of bells, lawmakers have to stay in the Legislative Yuan to play their required role,” CCW executive director Chang Hung-lin (張宏林) said.
In the past, legislators often neglected their official duties to focus on campaigning, Chang said.
The CCW cited drops in attendance levels and in the number of legislators taking part in the questioning of Executive Yuan officials ahead of elections, as lawmakers return to their districts to stump or make time to appear on political talk shows.
“Elections should just be a tool to becoming a representative, with the real objective being to play a political role, but right now the opposite is true,” CCW director Hsu Chu-feng said.
Hawang Shiow-duan (黃秀端), a Soochow University political science professor who chairs the CCW’s board of directors, said that come election time, Legislative Yuan committee chairs often classify a series of meetings over several days as one “meeting,” which means legislators only have to sign in on the first day for their attendance to be counted for all the days.
The legislature also often concludes its sessions early before elections, violating constitutional provisions that mandate that it be in session from September until the end of December, Chang said.
He said legislative sessions that come ahead of elections should be started early to make up for the lost time, and lawmakers should donate their salaries for the days after a session has been ended early to charity.
The focus on campaigning means lawmakers are likely to give just a perfunctory review to next year’s budget and to pass “pork barrel” spending, he said.
Legislators should not require only “general cuts” to ministry budgets in lieu of reviewing specific budget items because do so undermines their watchdog role, he said.
Executive Yuan officials decide where such general cuts fall and can artificially inflate budget figures beforehand, he said.
He also criticized lawmakers for using public resources to subsidize their campaigns, citing the use of legislative expense accounts to print campaign materials and cover travel costs, as well as requiring their legislative assistants to do campaign work.
Each legislator is allotted NT$500,000 a month to pay for their office staff, the group said.
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