It is already well-known that the National Assembly is one of the least trusted public institutions in the country. This public view has obviously worsened during the current 19th Assembly, which ends its last regular session Wednesday.
A recent Gallup Korea poll found that 82 percent of Koreans think the Assembly did not play its role well and that only 24 percent want current members to be reelected in next April’s general election.
Why does the general public give them such poor marks? First and foremost, the Assembly members are not faithful to the job they are elected to do — making laws.
With just one day remaining in the regular session, more than 11,400 bills are pending, and most of them are set to be abandoned. The comparable figures for the 18th and 17th Assemblies are 6,301 and 3,154, respectively.
Some may argue that the increase in the number of bills drafted by Assembly members has a positive side. In some sense it shows that lawmakers compete to write legislation.
But the problem is that many lawmakers tend to write bills for the sake of their performance record. Some even copy their colleagues’ work or bills that had been written during previous Assemblies.
A bigger problem is that Assembly members — as the number of bills set to expire shows — leave many bills unattended. There are some reasons that make the 19th Assembly the worst performer in terms of the number of unattended bills, including the much-disputed law that requires the consent of three-fifths of lawmakers for passing a bill and the perennial partisan confrontation between the rival parties.
But the fundamental problem is that the Assembly members lack the most important qualification for politicians — the ability and willingness to compromise.
That resulted in the idling of the entire parliamentary business for months after the Sewol ferry disaster in April last year. It has become routine for Assembly members to breach the laws they enacted: They again passed the state budget after the legal deadline and have yet to agree on how to redraw parliamentary constituencies although more than one month has passed the Nov. 13 election law deadline.
Ethical questions are another problem that has haunted the current Assembly. As many as 22 lawmakers have lost their seats after being implicated in various wrongdoings. Some were convicted of election law violations and others were charged with bribery, influence-peddling and abuse of power. There was even a lawmaker who quit — before the start of impeachment process — over allegations of a sexual assault against a woman.
In addition to the 22, 10 more Assembly lawmakers are standing trial, with the lower and appeals courts having already handed six of them punishments heavy enough to take their parliamentary seats away.
And there have been seemingly endless scandals involving lawmakers in recent months: There were lawmakers who peddled influence regarding their children’s education and job hunting. A lawmaker was found to have virtually extorted part of his secretary’s salary and another installed a credit card terminal in his Assembly office to sell his own books. Things like these combined to enrage the public and give the poorest report card to the current Assembly.
Those who want to run in the next general election are to register their preliminary candidacies next week. They will certainly include many of the current Assembly members and the job of filtering out unqualified ones will be entrusted to voters.
