[Editorial] Partisan bickering should be confined to parliament

At last, both the ruling and opposition parties have attended the opening ceremony of the National Assembly`s plenary session, which was convened Friday.

The opposition Grand National Party (GNP) members` attendance was much too late in the wake of their threat to boycott the ceremony to protest the ruling party`s suspected unlawful intervention in the relevant authorities` election spending probes.

The GNP`s sudden change toward attending probably came about due to their consideration that the general public would turn on them if they boycotted even the newly convened 16th National Assembly`s opening ceremony to start its first plenary session.

Additional reasons for the change were also because of their judgment that the boycotting of the opening ceremony could not only be a self-defeating move for them but, in particular, make them inconsistent given their earlier decision to attend the Assembly`s hearing Tuesday on the nominees for the presiding judge and two associate judges of the Constitutional Court and vote Friday on their confirmation motion at the plenary session.

In the past, we have seen too many political incidences in which our legislative members took their political issues out to the streets in their protest against ruling powers. In the process, they abandoned the parliament, the proper place for their political fight. All the world looked hellish at first when they howled about such loquacious political issues.

After the lapse of time, however, controversial issues and suspicions often became wish-washy and disappear altogether in the end. The legislative deliberations on state affairs and the people`s welfare and daily concerns turned out to be awfully inadequate and superficial in the process. It should be recalled here that the issues they took to the streets and waged fights for outside the parliament dwindled away to nothing after initial loquacious fussing about them.

That is why we would like to urge our members of parliament to wage their political fight or any debate on state affairs in the National Assembly. That is a lawmaker`s proper conduct in doing his duties. This will make any fact-finding probes and hearings more effective. The plenary session is fraught with bills that relate to the people`s daily lives. They include the appropriations of over 10 billion budgets; legal and institutional reorganization to reflect the progress in inter-Korean relations; threatening economic crisis; bills for financial holding companies; the separation of the professional role of doctors from pharmacists and an abolition of the ban on marriages of persons who have the same family names.

As for the suspicions over the unlawful loan scandal and the ruling party`s intervention in election spending probes, the parliament is advised to make use of its powers of audit, inspection and investigations of state affairs. This will assure them of a far more effective and thorough means for those investigations than their resort to street demonstrations.