July 1, 2024
SEOUL – Rival parties are expected to bicker in the coming weeks, as the opposition parties are mulling reintroducing contentious bills that President Yoon Suk Yeol had vetoed.
South Korea’s National Assembly is ready to float a bill calling for a special counsel probe into alleged state interference in a Marine Corps investigation into the cause of a young Marine’s death during a rescue operation last summer.
Rep. Park Chan-dae, acting chief of the Democratic Party of Korea, said during a rally of Marine Corps reserves in Yongsan, central Seoul, on Saturday that the party would “pass the special counsel bill (at the plenary session) at all costs” to achieve justice. Opposition parties won a clear majority of seats in their April general election victory, giving them ample power to railroad the bills through again in the new session that kicked off in late May.
Media bills may also be reintroduced, aimed at undermining the government and politicians’ influence over naming boardroom directors to control two terrestrial TV networks, namely Munhwa Broadcasting Corp. and Korea Broadcasting System, and at the same time weakening the Korea Communications Commission chief’s decision-making power over broadcasting service-related policies.
These bills had already passed the standing Legislation and Judiciary Committee of the National Assembly, on which the Democratic Party of Korea has the voting power to pass bills through to the National Assembly’s plenary session regardless of whether the ruling People Power Party boycotts or not at the committee level.
The special counsel bill gained committee-level approval on June 21 as the ruling party members boycotted, while the media bills gained the green light Tuesday with them present.
Also on Thursday, lawmakers from five opposition parties jointly proposed a motion to impeach KCC chief Kim Hong-il. Kim had been accused of cutting corners in the KCC board’s media-related decision-making, with three out of five board member seats currently vacant. Kim retorted at a parliamentary hearing on June 21 that the current setting “might not be desirable but is not against the law.”
Earlier in June, the Democratic Party pledged to let bills with the committee-level nod to gain plenary approval before the 22nd National Assembly’s extraordinary session ends Thursday.
The ball is in the court of Rep. Woo Won-shik, the National Assembly speaker who was elected as a Democratic Party lawmaker in April. The five-term veteran lawmaker has the authority to introduce the bills and the impeachment motion to the plenary session.
The ruling and opposition parties have yet to reach a compromise on the date for the plenary session in the coming week.
Should the National Assembly fail to pass the bills during the extraordinary session that goes until Thursday, the bills would be reintroduced in the 22nd National Assembly’s first regular session, which is to start Friday and is expected to last no longer than 100 days.
Yoon refused to sign similar bills into law in the 21st Assembly, which was also dominated by the opposition. The ruling bloc then claimed that these bills were advanced to the Cabinet without the opposition parties consulting with the ruling party.
If Yoon vetoes the bills again, the opposition would need at least eight ruling party lawmakers’ votes to override the presidential veto.
In this vein, minor opposition New Reform Party Rep. Lee Jun-seok claimed at a rally Saturday that Han Dong-hoon, the former justice minister and a ruling party leader hopeful, should come up with a list of ruling party lawmakers who would refuse to vote along the party line. Han was the only candidate for ruling party leader who hinted at conceding to the opposition’s request in terms of a special counsel bill that might target Yoon.
Yoon’s lingering political vulnerabilities, such as his alleged abuse of power concerning the Marine Corps investigation as well as his wife Kim Keon Hee’s alleged acceptance of a luxury handbag that was caught on hidden camera, have long put a damper on his approval ratings. On Friday, a Gallup Korea poll suggested that Yoon’s job approval stood at 25 percent, largely staying in the mid-20 percent range since mid-April.
Yoon has so far vetoed 14 bills during his first two-plus years of presidency, since May 2022.