Last month, the Council of Grand Justices ruled that some of the powers vested in the 319 Shooting Truth Investigation Special Committee were unconstitutional. Undeterred, the committee released a 150-page report on Monday on the March 19 assassination attempt. Many legal experts and academics have deplored the fact that this absurd and ridiculous report has cost the legislature a great opportunity to establish a model for its use of judicial investigative powers under the Constitution.
Since the committee was established last October, judicial reform groups and academics have criticized the legislation that was forced through by pan-blue legislators, pointing out that some of the powers granted to the committee by the statute were unconstitutional. The constitutional interpretation by the Council of Grand Justices last month said that many articles relating to the structure of the committee were flawed and unconstitutional.
After the grand justices denied the legal status of the committee and the legitimacy of its operation, the committee members should have immediately sought to amend those articles with which the grand justices found fault. The committee could then have exercised the judicial investigative powers properly granted it by the legislature. It would then have been in a position to make a thorough investigation of an incident that shook the nation.
Given that the legislature is dominated by the pan-blue camp, passing such amendments would not have been difficult. But, incomprehensibly, the committee chose not to try to repair its legal standing. Instead, despite its illegitimacy, it went ahead and finished its "investigation report."
Acting in such an irresponsible and offhand manner, the committee repeatedly failed to convince anyone of its impartiality, its thoroughness or its accuracy. Doesn't this undue haste in releasing a report seem to substantiate the doubts raised when the committee was first formed that its purpose was to serve as a political bludgeon rather than to seriously investigate the shooting?
The report is absurd, ludicrous even because the committee, working under conditions in which it was unable to conduct a proper investigation, departed from the principle of letting the evidence speak for itself, and instead constructed a "reasonable explanation" of how the shooting could have been used to manipulate the election. Committee spokesman Wang Ching-feng (
Since the committee lacks legitimacy, and failed to present either adequate human or material evidence, how can it have the temerity to demand the recall of the president? Given the absurdity of this situation, not even pan-blue legislators who helped create the committee in the first place are willing to back its findings. The committee members have only managed to make fools of themselves.
It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the claims in the committee's report that the shooting was staged, and the "reasonable explanation" of how the incident was used to manipulate the election, are unconvincing. It is possible that the committee members simply wanted to get their task over and done with and came to their conclusions without much thought.
Whatever the rationale, the committee members failed to establish a precedent for giving investigative powers to the legislature. An unconstitutional group has issued an irrelevant report with no legal standing. The only thing the report could possibly achieve is to console some members of the pan-blue camp.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
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
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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