Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo Credit: Cho Jung-tai/Facebook
THE DPP HAS suggested that it may seek a constitutional interpretation over the KMT’s efforts to block the national budget for next year. The KMT has now voted down the national budget five times in a row.
This move continues the KMT’s scorched earth tactics against the DPP. In particular, the KMT’s blocking of the national budget would also freeze the defense budget.
The KMT has attacked the idea of raising Taiwan’s defense budget, suggesting that raising the defense budget would be provocative of China. The US has been among the voices that have called on Taiwan to raise its defense budget, in order to cope with threats from China. But the KMT has not only sought to block raises to national expenditure, but to freeze high-profile defense projects such as Taiwan’s domestic submarine program.
This perhaps reflects where the KMT is at present. The KMT currently views its slim majority in the Legislative Yuan as giving it the mandate to try and block any and all actions by the DPP. As such, the KMT has continued its scorched-earth approach to the legislature, as observed in its efforts to seek expanded legislative powers that would allow legislators to summon individuals for political questioning earlier this year, as well as proposals to revive the Special Investigation Division previously used by the KMT to target political enemies and subordinate this to the legislature rather than the Ministry of Justice.
The Constitutional Court. Photo credit: Jiang/WikiCommons/CC BY-SA 3.0
Arguably, the KMT is seeking to strip away powers from other branches of government and to relegate such powers to the Legislative Yuan because it is unable to win national elections at present. Because it still has a foothold in the Legislative Yuan, with a slim majority in coordination with the TPP, consequently it seeks to strengthen the legislature at the expense of over branches of government.
The constitution states that the Executive Yuan has remit over drawing up the national budget. The point of contention is regarding compensation for Indigenous lands, in authorizing 60,000 NT per hectare of land for compensation for a logging ban. As the TPP and KMT have authorized this expenditure but the Executive Yuan has not, the Executive Yuan is seeking to defend its authority over the budget, as because the TPP and KMT has refused to take up the budget if this is not passed.
But, to this extent, the issue at hand continues to be that the KMT and TPP are seeking to arrogate powers that belong to other branches of government to the legislature, simply because they control the legislature at present and no other branch of government. The KMT and TPP certainly have not decided to simply wait for the next set of elections to try and win the presidency, in order to have those powers, likely due to lacking faith in their capacity to do so.
Nevertheless, if the Executive Yuan does seek a constitutional interpretation, the KMT is likely to leverage on the move to strengthen its push to freeze the constitutional court. With a number of justices set to retire this month, the KMT sought to restrict the ability of the constitutional court to make judgments with less than a full court of justices.
As the KMT is likely to also dig its heels in and seek to prevent the Lai administration from appointing more justices, then this would effectively freeze the constitutional court after the retirement of the justices.
This, then, would be a move by the KMT aimed at freezing the judiciary, given the possibility of the judiciary declaring moves by it to be unconstitutional. Though the KMT has tried to frame this as a reaction to the DPP’s control of the judiciary, the KMT is simply aiming to freeze branches of government not under its control.
It is to be seen if the KMT’s efforts to block the budget outrage the public, particularly if they stand to be affected by the freeze in spending. The KMT may misstep if it thinks it has the popular mandate to freeze the national budget as a whole, particularly as its popular support is tenuous, as reflected in that it did not win any presidential election in the last three consecutive presidential terms, and likely did not win the majority vote in the legislature either.