[Editorial] MDP's forfeiture of credentials as the ruling party

The ruling Millennium Democratic Party's anti-parliamentary tactics to foil, by physical means, the impeachment proceedings against the nation's two highest prosecutors will only exacerbate the country's crisis situation. The opposition Grand National Party (GNP) declared its total boycott of any further parliamentary proceedings and agendas together with its fight against the ¡°dictatorial Kim Dae-Jung regime.'' This legislative deadlock and political standoff is bound to heighten, nation-wide, the sense of social crisis and intensify the burden and stress on the people.

The Millennium Democratic Party (MDP) has all along claimed that the GNP's impeachment motion against the two heads of the prosecution failed to meet the legal requirements to be voted on. The MDP's far-fetched argument had it that the passage of the motion would inevitably paralyze the state's power to enforce law and order and create a state of national crisis for several months until the Constitutional Court's decision on its constitutionality. Such self-serving rhetoric has in the end brought about today's greater national crisis.

Its immediate consequences are indefinite delays in the deliberation of such urgent parliamentary agendas as New Year's budget bills, probes on the public rescue funds and the bills for the people's welfare and day-to-day living. This will further aggravate our present uncertainties about a looming economic crisis. Now, the probability is high that the Kim administration's public pledge to complete the reforms in the labor, corporate, financial and public sectors by February next year will stop at an empty promise.

By far the fundamental crisis, however, appears to be the fact that the people's confidence in the Kim administration's commitment to parliamentary democracy has sharply dropped.

The MDP argues that the impeachment motion is null and void with its original flaws, but this was the motion that the Speaker, a MDP member, laid before the plenary session in compliance with due parliamentary procedures. Accordingly, the legislature should have acted on the agenda within 72 hours after the Speaker's notice of the motion to the parliamentary session, if it was to satisfy the laws of the land and principles of parliamentary democracy.

In order to make the United Liberal Democrats (ULD) a parliamentary negotiating group, it should be recalled here, the MDP resorted to railroading the passage of bills to revise the National Assembly Law. The MDP's simple excuse for taking such an extraordinary railroading action was that the GNP was trying to prevent the presentation of the bill before the session. And, this time, the MDP also resorted to the use of physical means to stall altogether any proceedings to present the motion. How, then, could the MDP possibly consider itself the ruling party with due credentials to talk about parliamentary democracy.

Also regretful here is what appeared to be Speaker Lee Man-Sup's opportunistic conduct. Speaker Lee should have tabled the impeachment motion immediately after the interpellation on the affairs of government ministries, but he adjourned the meeting, which enabled the MDP members to stall the session's resumption by physically preventing the Speaker's return to the podium. We should like to ask him whether it was his double-handed ploy to retain, on the one hand, his popularity as a Speaker with principles but, on the other, he actually meant to cooperate with the ruling party's underhanded, partisan strategy.

Before it is too late, the MDP must now come to its senses to take full responsibility for the debacle of the impeachment motion. The general public can hardly be persuaded by the MDP's partisan blame on the opposition party for the consequence of the legislative debacle by overlooking in the first place the fundamental reason that brought it about. Needless to say, the primary responsibility for the national crisis must rest on the ruling party.