Kharis Templeman of the Hoover Institution talks about how deepening disagreements over Taiwan's Constitutional Court and budget are worsening a divide in the legislature as the nation's institutions face partisan attacks.
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00:00Carson, in your last article, you mentioned that Taiwan might be entering a period of
00:04constitutional crises.
00:06Could you explain a little bit about what you mean by this term?
00:09Well, so the most imminent problem is that the constitutional court right now in Taiwan
00:16does not have a full membership.
00:20So there are only eight justices of the 15 in the court who hold office right now.
00:27And the crisis is that the legislature just passed a bill requiring a quorum of at least
00:33ten justices to meet to hear any sort of challenges to laws based on their constitutionality.
00:40So we're in a position where the court can't actually rule on anything that the legislature
00:44does now.
00:46And despite that, the executive branch has asked the court to go ahead and rule on the
00:51constitutionality of the law that makes it impossible for them to rule on constitutionality
00:58of laws.
00:59So we're kind of caught in a limbo here.
01:03And so the court could decide that they have the right to review this law anyway.
01:10And then the legislature, I imagine, will probably react in a very harsh way towards
01:16the court.
01:17Reports of this bill have stated that the KMT and TPP are politicizing the constitutional
01:22court by punishing them for rulings against bills which those two parties earlier favored.
01:29Can you talk a little bit about this political division right now?
01:32Yeah, I think there's some deeply problematic aspects to the decision to raise the thresholds
01:39for a valid court decision.
01:42The timing is, you know, obviously suspicious.
01:46The introduction of the raising of the threshold of that bill, it actually occurred right after
01:52the court narrowed the scope of Taiwan's death penalty.
01:57And that was a perfectly valid thing for the court to do.
02:00There's another way you could have designed this law if you weren't trying to punish the
02:03court, which is to say, this will take effect in two years from now, right, and that will
02:08give us time to seek new justices.
02:11The current ability of the court to actually function won't be affected in the near term.
02:19But the opposition chose, I think, to take a more confrontational approach.
02:24And I don't think you can read it any other way.
02:26I think this was retaliatory against the court.
02:29And I think that is, unfortunately, a pretty direct attack on judicial independence of Taiwan.
02:35One of the other key points of tension is the formation of the budget, which I've seen
02:40key portions slashed.
02:42Can you talk a little bit about how this plays into current political tensions inside the
02:47legislature?
02:48Let me start with the observation that the legislature does have the legal power to freeze
02:56or cut budgets.
02:58And that's really the one kind of clear constitutional authority they have over the executive branch.
03:04I actually think I fault the Lai administration and President Lai himself for not recognizing
03:10the new political dynamic that is now in Taiwan, the new facts on the ground, you know.
03:17If you don't have a majority in the legislature, you've got to talk to the opposition, right?
03:22So I've criticized the DPP, now let me criticize the opposition as well.
03:28The cuts that they've made have just been vindictive.
03:32There hasn't been a kind of clear rationale for going after certain parts of the government
03:39other than there are agencies that they just don't like and they want to send a message
03:45to the DPP.