It's not the best time for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislative caucus to request a constitutional interpretation from the Council of Grand Justices on the law governing the National Assembly's operations, political observers said yesterday.
The DPP caucus' request followed its failed attempt to seek a reconsideration of part of the law in the legislature last week.
"I'm afraid that the DPP is putting itself in a very awkward position, although it's the right and necessary way to go," said Taipei Society Chairman Hung Yu-hung (
Hung said it would have been preferable for the DPP to wait until the ratification process was complete. If the assembly votes in favor of the constitutional amendment package, Hung said the DPP may want to scrap its plan to get a constitutional interpretation. But if the assembly votes against the amendments, it wouldn't be too late for the DPP to make such a request.
Hsu Yung-ming (徐永明), a research fellow at the Research Center for Humanities and Social Sciences at Academia Sinica, said that the DPP's move to request a constitutional interpretation from the Council of Grand Justices is primarily a political move aimed at the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT).
"The assembly meeting may have well ended and the political agenda shifted when the ruling comes out," Hsu said. "The gesture is aimed more at pressuring the KMT, which is also in favor of the constitutional amendments, to refrain from deviating from its stance on the matter."
While the grand justices' ruling may not impact the assembly's decision on the constitutional amendment package, Hsu said that it may help solve similar constitutional disputes in the future, because the issue of the ratification threshold would be fully debated and a legal explanation given.
Both Hung and Hsu agreed that former DPP chairman Lin I-hsiung (林義雄) played a key role in the DPP's flip-flop on the matter.
In a bid to get the Executive Yuan off the hook, Hsu said that the DPP decided to let its legislative caucus do the damage control after the Statute Governing the Operation of the National Assembly (
Under pressure from civic groups -- mainly those led by Lin and Hung -- the DPP caucus requested the lawmaking body reconsider two of the law's articles: the one requiring a three-quarters majority vote for the passage of constitutional amendments and another stipulating that ballots cast by assembly members failing to toe their party's line should be dubbed "invalid," yet still be counted as part of the total number of votes.
After the DPP caucus failed in that effort, Lin pressed on, asking the Executive Yuan to request that the legislature block the statute. The government declined to do so, but let the DPP caucus file a request for a constitutional interpretation from the grand justices. Also, although President Chen Shui-bian (
Analyzing the DPP's strategy, Hsu said that it reflects the party's flexibility in responding to Lin's petition.
"It is now putting pressure on the KMT, which is caught between its promise of supporting the constitutional amendments and the possible defiance of its own assembly members on the matter," he said.
While the DPP can tell the public that it did everything it could to ensure the success of constitutional amendments if they fail to be approved, Hung said that the KMT, on the other hand, would have to take responsibility for having accepted a higher ratification threshold and then later opposed the idea of lowering the bar.
Despite his recognition of the DPP's effort, Hung criticized the DPP for harboring "opportunist" thinking, especially when it yielded to accepting a higher threshold during the cross-party talks held after the assembly election on May 14.
Since the assembly seats held by the DPP and the KMT combined take up more than 80 percent of the total seats, the DPP agreed to concede to the three-quarters threshold, abandoning its original stance of insisting on a simple majority.
The party then started to worry about the fate of constitutional amendments after a KMT assembly member threatened to block the constitutional amendment package.
Although the DPP has vowed to expel any of its assembly members who fail to toe the party's line and immediately replace them, it has no control over KMT assembly members.
Lin said that President Chen should be recalled if he signed into law the bill governing the assembly's operations, which he criticized as an "unconstitutional" violation of democracy.
When asked whether his group would launch a campaign to recall Chen now that he'd made the bill law, Hung said that he does not see such a necessity because Chen has done everything in his power to right the wrong.
"We recognize the efforts he made and the courage the DPP has had to [try to] correct a wrongdoing when it realized it had made a mistake," Hung said.
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