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Legislative Yuan starts four-day voting marathon

Legislators ready to vote during Monday's special session.

Legislative Yuan faces new voting marathon

Legislators ready to vote during Monday's special session.

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – After a day which saw lawmakers vote on guidelines for ill-gotten party assets, the Legislative Yuan faced a non-stop voting marathon lasting more than 80 hours, this time on the budgets of state enterprises, reports said Tuesday.
The 113-member body spent most of Monday voting on a controversial project to review allegedly illegally acquired assets by the Kuomintang, with the opposition trying to block the passage of the bill by adding as many amendments as possible.
A similar tactic was being deployed Tuesday as 2,419 items were added to the budget review of the state corporations, not all of the proposals came from the KMT, reports said.
While a total of 1,668 were filed by the main opposition, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party also presented 818 motions. According to various calculations mentioned in the media, voting on all the proposals would take between 15 and 30 days even if the lawmakers worked 24 hours a day as four rounds of voting were possible for each item.
As a result of the busy agenda, the Legislature decided to call a non-stop session from Tuesday 6 p.m. until July 29 midnight, equally four days and three nights or more than 80 hours of non-stop activity.
Top DPP lawmaker Ker Chien-ming condemned the opposition action, pointing out that the current state corporation budget proposals had been drawn up when the KMT was still running the government.
During the morning Tuesday, caucuses were still negotiating to try and find a way out of the impasse, but the talks failed, leading Legislative Speaker Su Jia-chyuan to open the session during the afternoon and allow voting to begin.
The DPP won a majority of seats at the Legislature in the January 16 elections, so government proposals and policies are widely expected to win in the end.