The brouhaha in the Legislative Yuan on Wednesday during the review of the proposed referendum law, complete with name-calling, flag-waving and the melodramatic passing out of DPP lawmaker Hsu Jung-shu (
As a country that holds elections within abnormally short intervals, people have become used to seeing politicians speaking about their respect for the "popular will" to the point of tears. Next time any legislator tries to gain sympathy votes with this act, first check out whether he or she has lived up to those words during Wednesday's review session.
The bill, proposed by DPP lawmaker Trong Chai (
The fear of the PFP and KMT lawmakers, which eventually successfully blocked review of the bill with their majority in the Home and Nations Committee, was that the said bill, if enacted, would be used to change the name, national flag or national anthem of this country or, to put it in their own words, "to accomplish Taiwan independence."
Unfortunately, there are several major problems with this line of reasoning. First of all, the independent sovereignty of this country is already a fact beyond dispute. So, unless they are delusional enough to think that Taiwan is part of China and they are lawmakers of the PRC, the issue of Taiwan independence is really moot.
Perhaps they simply have a distaste for the name "Taiwan," the name they suspect that the pan-green is plotting to adopt for this country once the said proposed law is enacted. Perhaps we should feel sorry for people so conflicted they can't bear to hear the name of the place where they live. Be that as it may, if they have any respect for the democratic process, they should surely only approve of a law that deepens democracy by allowing people a more direct say in their own affairs.
And with this in mind, if a majority of people did vote in a referendum to change the name, national flag or national anthem, how dare these lawmakers stand in the way of the people's clearly expressed will. But it goes beyond this. It is not just a matter of democratic principle but people's constitutional right. Article 17 of the Constitution, which states that "The people shall have the right of election, recall, initiative and referendum." The former refers to the right of the people, upon obtaining a sufficient number of endorsements, to initiate and submit bill for plebiscites. The latter refers to the right of the people to approve or reject bills proposed by the Legislative Yuan through plebiscites.
We could also point out that the version of the bill being reviewed had been seriously watered down, specifically prohibiting voting on "national orientation issues," such as such as the country's boundaries, formal title and national anthem. Yet, the opposition lawmakers continue to claim that the passage of the bill would mean the end of the "ROC." Basically there is no logic to this behavior and we can only hope that people will show their disapproval of such stupidity at the polls.
Other reasons cited by the opposition lawmakers included concerns on the part of the US and the objections of China. In terms of former, since when have the typically anti-American opposition lawmakers cared about the attitude of the US? In fact, it was during that very same review session that a PFP lawmaker shouted "long live Iraq." As for the latter reason, perhaps they are forgetting that they are still ROC lawmakers, not yet the PRC functionaries they so earnestly desire to become.
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In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
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