(圖片來源：Wikimedia Commons，美國知名智庫Brookings Institute。)
President Chen Shui-bian called the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall a feudalistic monstrosity and wanted to get rid of it.On cue, the Government Information Office said it would be renamed the Taiwan Democracy Memorial Park and the Council for Economic Planning and Development decided to raze the wall surrounding the park to make it more easily accessible to the public.The demolition plan has met opposition, while the renaming requires a law amendment.The Ministry of Education, which has jurisdiction over the park, has made an end-run, rendering the amendment unnecessary.
When Chiang Ching-kuo had the park created in memory of his father, his obedient Legislative Yuan passed an organization law that places it under direct control of the minister of education.The ministry decided to relegate it under control of its department, making it a unit on a level three grades below the Executive Yuan.The ministry is one grade below the Executive Yuan.Its department is on a level two grades below.The park under control of a department is three grades below, and as such, it can have its name changed without going through the whole long process of amending its organic law.Minister of Education Tu Cheng-sheng knows full well it is next to impossible to get a proposal to change the name passed by the Legislative Yuan, where the opposition alliance of the Kuomintang and the People First Party has a majority of two.
In fact, Tu repeated what his cabinet colleague had done before.The Ministry of Transportation and Communications had privatized the Post Office before the name of the Republic of China was changed to Taiwan on memorial postage stamps issued to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the February 28 Incident of 1947 at the end of last month.Had it remained under government control, the Post Office would have had to get an amendment to its organic law adopted by the legislature before the memorial stamps could be sold.
Both ministries made a very good end-run play.But they established a very bad precedent.They successfully challenged the power of the nation’s highest legislative organ that is supposed to provide checks and balances of our republican government.
（本文刊載於96.03.12 China Post第4版，本文代表作者個人意見）
周家華
(
2019年1月11日 08:37
)
王順民
(
2024年10月11日 15:05
)
李正修
(
2月27日 13:51
)
