As legislators in Taiwan once again come to blows over controversial legal changes, TaiwanPlus spoke to political risk analyst Ross Feingold about what they reveal about the country's partisan politics.
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00:00I think when a lot of people see this footage of fighting in the legislature,
00:03they may think this is a government in disarray that is dysfunctional. Are they wrong?
00:09They're wrong in the sense that this kind of pushing and shoving or blocking the doorway,
00:15even more violent interactions between legislators from the different parties
00:20is somewhat out of the ordinary, but it actually is quite ordinary. Taiwan has a long history of
00:26but eventually legislating proceeds, even if one side or the other does not like the outcome.
00:33Let's say all of the amendments that passed eventually make it into law. How big of a
00:37change would this be? Is it the kind of thing that would impact politics for years to come,
00:42or is it a more marginal change? I think these are significant changes.
00:46Increasing the quorum requirement for the Constitutional Court could have implications
00:51for laws that haven't even been passed or other types of challenges to whether something
00:56is constitutional or not. Thinking of things like marriage equality, where it was interpretations
01:02by the executive branch that were challenged as being unconstitutional and eventually were found
01:08to be unconstitutional. The same thing with the allocation of government revenues between the
01:13central government and local governments. If that remains as is post-amendment, that means going out
01:20into the future, the amount of money that the central government could spend is going to be
01:24significantly reduced, and the amount of money that local governments can spend, where that's
01:29basically handed over to them for spending, will increase substantially. This would also benefit
01:34the Chinese Nationalist Party because they control far more local governments at the moment than the
01:40Democratic Progressive Party does. Is this about separation of powers or is this purely partisan?
01:45In other words, if we were to see the party of the president and the legislative majority flip,
01:50you expect to see a DPP majority reverse these amendments?
01:54No, I would expect them to continue to support these changes because if they had a legislative
02:00majority, it might give them more power. So again, when the shoe's on the other foot,
02:05we see the parties acting in the opposite way to which they previously acted,
02:09and that's one of the traditions of Taiwan democracy.