Judging from the way things look, there will be no Control Yuan members reporting for duty for a while. The pan-blue legislative caucuses yesterday still refused to even review the nominations made by President Chen Shui-bian (
What is so ridiculous about this whole thing is not that the pan-blues are unhappy with the list of nominees presented for its approval; after all, it is virtually impossible to come up with a list that is acceptable to all. The puzzling thing is this: The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the People First Party do not even want to look at the list. They have thus far abused their legislative majority by refusing to even place the review of the nominations on the agenda.
If they think that any particular nominees are ill-qualified or if they simply don't like someone, they can just vote "no" to these individuals' nominations. As a matter of fact, if they are so unhappy with the entire list, they can reject each and every nominee.
What this really amounts to is a refusal on the part of the pan-blue legislators to perform their duty to review and approve or disapprove the president's nominations. According to Article 7 of the Additional Articles of the Constitution, members of the Control Yuan are to be chosen by nomination by the president and with the consent of the Legislative Yuan. In other words, the Constitution stipulates that the Legislative Yuan must participate in the decision-making process for the appointment of Control Yuan members. While there is no requirement that the legislature must give its consent, it cannot refuse flat-out to even review the nominations.
Leaving aside the issue of the constitutionality of the pan-blue lawmakers' conduct, they have also betrayed the voters' confidence and trust by refusing to perform their duty.
Moreover, between the scenario in which the pan-blues simply reject the candidates they feel are ill-qualified and then have the president make alternative nominations for just those vacancies, on the one hand, and the scenario in which the president resubmits a totally new list that is acceptable to the pan-blue camp, the end result will be pretty much the same, except that the second scenario will make the president look bad -- like a schoolboy being instructed to redo his homework.
Actually, since his election Chen has made many progressive reforms to the manner in which Control Yuan nominees are produced. In the past, the president made the decision himself, behind closed doors. Chen has implemented a system in which others can also make recommendations, after which special committees are established by the president to review these recommendations. The entire nomination process is highly transparent. Under the circumstances, it is indeed difficult to imagine that Chen's list could be unacceptable in its entirety.
The public has the most to lose due to such unreasonable bickering between politicians. As a result of the pan-blue lawmakers' refusal to perform their duty, several important national examinations -- including the licensing examinations for doctors, nurses and technicians, may be postponed, since legally speaking these tests must be monitored by members of the Control Yuan. It is truly regretful that the pan-blues have failed to place the public interest above all else.
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,
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