hankyoreh

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With President Park Geun-hye refusing to step down on her own and remaining inflexible, the multiplicity of political options that had been proposed appear to be converging on the single solution of impeachment. Even the opposition Minjoo Party, which had been wavering about moving forward with impeachment proceedings, unanimously adopted impeachment as the party’s official position, during a meeting of lawmakers on Nov. 21. Even though party leaders urged caution during the meeting about initiating the proceedings until enough votes for impeachment have been secured, other lawmakers insisted that there is no need to wait and that the proceedings should be launched right away.

Bringing a motion of impeachment to a vote requires a majority (more than 151) of lawmakers in the National Assembly, and given that opposition parties hold a majority, that should not be difficult. The question is whether enough lawmakers can be convinced to vote for the motion, which requires support from at least two-thirds of sitting lawmakers to pass. According to the National Assembly Act, once a motion of impeachment has been submitted and a report made to a full session of the National Assembly, a vote must be held between 24 and 72 hours. In the worst-case scenario, opposition parties would initiate impeachment proceedings while only having enough support for bringing the motion to a vote, and then the motion would fail to reach the two-thirds mark in a full vote. That is why there are differing views even among opposition lawmakers about when the motion of impeachment should be brought to the floor.

Members of the opposition People’s Party take the pledge of allegiance at the National Assembly in Seoul on Nov. 21. (by Lee Jeong-woo

During the meeting of Minjoo Party lawmakers on Nov. 21, the majority view was that there is no reason to delay bringing a motion of impeachment to a vote since the legal requirements have been satisfied, but party leaders held a different view. Leaders argued that the party should wait until internal strength had been consolidated and external conditions were ripe. In the view of the party leadership, lawmakers need to keep making the case for impeachment until they have secured more than the 200 lawmakers needed to pass the motion in the National Assembly and until people at the candlelight rallies who are calling for Park’s immediate resignation have accepted impeachment in the National Assembly as the only remaining choice.

On the other hand, Minjoo Party lawmakers who want the impeachment proceedings to begin immediately hold that it would be better to launch them now, while the popular uproar is at its peak. Given that the legal requirements for impeachment have been met by the interim announcement of investigators’ findings, which described Park as an accomplice in the Choi Sun-sil influence-peddling scandal, the party should move before the Blue House and the pro-Park faction of the Saenuri Party can close ranks.

Considering that a majority of lawmakers appear to support the idea of moving forward with the impeachment immediately, numerous sources at the National Assembly expect that the proceedings will be launched around the candlelight rally scheduled for Nov. 26, which is likely to be the biggest demonstration in South Korean history. “If the president doesn’t step down by Nov. 26, we must move forward with impeachment proceedings at once,” said Justice Party Leader Shim Sang-jung during a meeting of eight opposition party leaders on Nov. 19.

For a motion of impeachment to be passed in a full session of the National Assembly, all 171 opposition party lawmakers and independent lawmakers, along with 29 lawmakers from the ruling Saenuri Party, must vote to pass it. An emergency committee in the Saenuri Party, which is largely composed of lawmakers not from the pro-Park faction, announced that 32 current Saenuri lawmakers expressed their support on Nov. 20 for moving forward at once with impeachment proceedings. That‘s three more than the 29 Saenuri Party lawmakers whose support is needed to pass the motion in the National Assembly (presuming that all independent and opposition lawmakers support the motion).

But the opposition party leaders do not seem confident that they can pass the motion of impeachment with this level of support. “There could be some dissenting votes from the People’s Party, and there’s no telling what kind of threats the pro-Park faction and the Blue House might use against the 32 Saenuri Party lawmakers who say they support impeachment. We can’t let our guard down,” said a key official in the Minjoo Party.

“We need to start preparing for bringing the motion to a vote by collecting signatures from many more than the quorum of 200 that is required to pass the motion,” said Rep. Park Jie-won, chair of the People’s Party emergency committee.

If the motion of impeachment is passed, Park’s presidential duties will be suspended. The National Assembly’s Legislation and Judiciary Committee, who chairs the committee in charge of impeachment motions, also serve as the prosecutor in the impeachment hearing held before the Constitutional Court.

There are concerns among opposition party lawmakers about the fact that the chair of the Legislation and Judiciary Committee (Saenuri Party lawmaker Rep. Kwon Seong-dong) is a former public prosecutor with a strongly conservative bent. But in a telephone interview with the Hankyoreh on Nov. 21, Kwon promised to “adhere to the protocol of the National Assembly Act if [a motion of impeachment] is passed by a majority of lawmakers in the National Assembly.”

“I will faithfully implement the necessary procedures in the National Assembly Act,” Kwon said, referring to measures that could include a separate investigation by the standing committee. On Nov. 21, Kwon expressed his support for moving forward with the impeachment proceedings.

By Lee Se-young and Kim Jin-cheol, staff reporters

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