Opposition legislators yesterday for the fifth time blocked a NT$1.25 trillion (US$39.8 billion) special defense budget bill and fiscal amendments from the agenda for the Legislative Yuan’s next plenary sessions.
The Act Governing the Allocation of Government Revenues and Expenditures (財政收支劃分法) and the special defense bill, announced last month by President William Lai (賴清德), were again stopped from proceeding to the committee review stage.
The Legislative Yuan’s Procedure Committee passed the draft agenda for handling the upcoming plenary sessions proposed by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Chien-chi (林倩綺) with a 10-8 majority vote.
Photo: Liu Hsin-de, Taipei Times
The next plenary sessions are scheduled for Friday and Tuesday next week.
The Executive Yuan on Nov. 27 approved the special act for the budget to bolster defense resilience and asymmetric capabilities by funding weapons procurement and joint development programs with the US from next year to 2033.
The blocking of the special budget came as China conducted a second day of large-scale military drills around Taiwan, in an apparent response to a US$11.1 billion US arms sale to Taiwan announced by Washington on Dec. 17.
The opposition is not only cutting the bill from the agenda, but is completely unwilling to discuss the matter, Democratic Progressive Party Legislator Puma Shen (沈伯洋) said.
The Procedure Committee is where bills are formally registered and it should not be used to block them, Shen said.
Any strict oversight regarding the bill should be handled by the legislature’s Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee, he said.
The KMT caucus claims it is unable to approve an NT$1.25 trillion budget based on just two or six pages of information about the proposal, but wants a special act passed before a special budget can be fully drafted, he said.
The KMT’s stance is to invest in military preparedness and peace, and the one blocking the defense budget is actually Lai, as he refuses to address the legislature and answer questions, KMT caucus secretary-general Lo Chih-chiang (羅智強) said.
In other developments, KMT Legislator Weng Hsiao-ling (翁曉玲) proposed an amendment to Article 2 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution (中華民國憲法增修條文) to add provisions for recalls of presidents or vice presidents.
The changes would make it so a recall motion could be initiated with proposals from more than 1.5 percent of all eligible voters and formalized after obtaining signatures from more than 10 percent.
The proposal would grant voters the right to initiate a presidential recall, as with recalls of county and city heads, legislators and councilors, Weng said.
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