Recent media reporting on the legislature has been focused on revelations about Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Wu Yu-sheng’s (吳育昇) extramarital affair, alongside key policy issues such as the importation of US bone-in beef and the signing of a memorandum of understanding with China on cross-strait financial supervision. As a member of a civic group devoted to monitoring the legislature’s performance, I feel that these stories have a common thread — they show that the legislature is becoming more and more devoid of substance.
Even when they are not caught up with love affairs and other shenanigans, our lawmakers have become completely marginalized on important policy issues. The Cabinet feels free to push policies through without even a rubber stamp endorsement from the legislature.
It must be said that lawmakers have brought themselves into disrepute. As if their image were not poor enough, they keep getting involved in scandals, and public confidence in the legislature keeps plunging. The star of the latest scandal is a sharp-tongued lawmaker who has often demanded high moral standards of others, so it came as a surprise to find out that his private life is full of material and physical desires. He likes to take attractive women out to dinner, and when he rents a car it has to be an expensive one. This is in stark contrast to the facade of an incorruptible family man that he put on to win votes.
This political culture, in which the appearance and the reality are so very different, is a smokescreen for all kinds of behind-the-scenes collusion and exchanges of favors between politicians and business interests. Muckraking media have revealed that shady relations over the dinner table are the stock-in-trade of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers. If the media dig any deeper, the whole lot of them may come tumbling down.
The most exasperating thing is that legislators get paid the same high salary whatever they do, and it turns out that their biggest concern is to look after their private relationships and pad their wallets. Who, then, is going to properly oversee the government’s budget and policies? The first big problem facing the legislature is that its members have no self-respect, so few among the public have confidence in them.
The second problem is even bigger. Since the KMT gained control of the executive as well as the legislature, the latter’s right to take part in policymaking has rapidly whittled away. Starting from the agreements reached at the first meeting between Straits Exchange Foundation Chairman Chiang Pin-kung (江丙坤) and Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林), which took effect automatically, Cabinet agencies, especially those concerned with national security, have come to see the legislature at most as a token body that only needs to be politely informed of government decisions.
Just the other day, the Financial Supervisory Commission went through the motions of telling legislators about the cross-strait MOU in the morning, and the agreement was a done deal that very afternoon — a classic example of the way policies get pushed through these days.
Similarly, negotiations with the US over importing bone-in beef were handled by the National Security Council, which arrogantly asserts that the protocol it signed takes precedence over domestic law. Apparently, the principle that the legislature should serve as a check and balance on the executive does not apply to Taiwan’s “elected monarchy.”
Legislators are the elected representatives of public opinion, but they have no power to block any policy the elected emperor wants to put into force. They are left with only a walk-on role, and therein lies Taiwan’s constitutional crisis.
Maybe it’s because our lawmakers have nothing much to do these days that they have so much time for pulling stunts and getting involved in scandals. Since they aren’t doing their job of speaking up for the public and the legislature has been stripped of its checks-and-balance role, perhaps it is time that legislators’ salaries were halved and a referendum held on whether the legislature should be scrapped altogether. What do you think?
Ku Chung-hwa is chairman of Citizens’ Congress Watch.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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