A two-hour meeting on this year's government budget devolved into shouting and name-calling as partisan tensions flared.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00We are talking about budget now.
00:02Why haven't you shut up for so long?
00:04Shut up!
00:05Shouting and name-calling in the legislature
00:08as partisan grievances flare.
00:10Lawmakers have almost 3,300 budgetary items
00:14to clear for the year ahead,
00:16from military spending to the budget on media,
00:19including Taiwan Plus.
00:20And they've yet to get on the same page
00:22about even one of them.
00:24When they reconvene later Thursday,
00:26the temperature is unlikely to come down.
00:29Controversial recent bills affecting things
00:31like the Constitutional Court
00:33have the ruling Democratic Progressive Party
00:35and the chief opposition party,
00:37the Kuomintang, at each other's throats.
00:39Both sides are now threatening each other
00:41with a nuclear option,
00:43a mass nationwide recall campaign.
00:46They hope to wipe out the opponent's caucus.
00:49These threats helped derail Wednesday's attempt
00:51at budget talks.
00:52I want the Kuomintang to be wiped out.
00:55All these traitors.
00:57I'm sorry.
00:58What's your budget?
01:00But this wasn't the only loss of cool
01:02during the meeting.
01:03You're talking nonsense.
01:04I'm listening to a stupid man talking nonsense.
01:07And Taiwan's third party,
01:09the Taiwan People's Party,
01:10is angry at the DPP, too.
01:13It's incensed at what it sees
01:15as the politically-motivated corruption charges
01:17against its founder, Ke Wen-je.
01:20Now it's also angry at accusations
01:23its proposed 3 percent military budget cut
01:26was motivated by sympathy for China.
01:29The party says the military budget
01:31has gone down steadily
01:32under the rule of both the other parties.
01:48There was some substantive discussion.
01:51On the defense budget,
01:52there was debate about how much to spend
01:54on Taiwan's domestic submarine program.
01:57But here, too,
01:58disagreement about the facts,
02:00in this case,
02:01how much the defense minister had asked for,
02:03brought talks to a halt.
02:25With no progress,
02:26Speaker Han Kuo-yu called a recess until Thursday.
02:30But the fraught political atmosphere
02:32isn't going away.
02:34And it could be some time
02:35before lawmakers can cool down enough
02:37to start making a dent
02:38in the significant amount of work ahead of them.
02:41Joseph Wu and John Ventriest for Taiwan Plus.