Friday, Aug. 31, 2012
Diet business has reached paralysis as the opposition forces on Wednesday passed a censure motion against Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda. Following passage of the motion, the opposition forces plan to boycott all the deliberations in both houses of the Diet on bills submitted by the government.
The last day of the current Diet session, Sept. 8, is likely to come without enactment of two important bills one to rectify the imbalance in the value of a vote between urban areas and depopulated rural areas in the Lower House election and the other to float bonds worth 38 trillion accounting for about 42 percent of the fiscal 2012 budget. This parliamentary deadlock will only deepen people's distrust of politics.
Mr. Noda and his ruling Democratic Party of Japan seem to be primarily responsible for causing the current impasse. Obviously their Diet policy related to the two bills was solely based on the idea of promoting partisan interests. At the same time, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party cannot escape criticism, as it opposed the bond flotation bill apparently in an attempt to prod Mr. Noda to dissolve the Lower House soon.
The consequences will be grave. The Supreme Court may nullify the results of a next Lower House Election because of the failure to rectify the vote-value disparity and nearly half of the fiscal 2012 budget may not be implemented.
The Supreme Court in March 2011 ruled that the results of the 2009 Lower House election are "in the state of being unconstitutional" due to the vote-value disparity although it stopped short of declaring the election results null and void.
If some 42 percent of the budget is not implemented, it will seriously affect people's lives. Although the DPJ faced the LDP's opposition to the bond issuance bill, Mr. Noda and the DPJ seem to have forgotten that enacting and fully implement a budget is a very important and urgent job for the government.
The DPJ rammed the vote-value rectification bill and the bond issuance bill through the Lower House on Tuesday and sent them to the Upper House without coordinating with the opposition forces or persuading them to cooperate.
For the sake of rectifying the vote-value disparity, the LDP had submitted a bill to simply reduce the number of Lower House seats from single-seat constituencies by five through elimination of one single-seat constituency in five prefectures.
But the DPJ submitted a different bill, which features not only reduction of the number of the seats from single-seat constituencies by five but also reduction of 40 seats from proportional representation and a scheme to give some advantage to small parties in proportional representation.
Original post:
Diet business at an impasse
