Confirmation or Condonation?

Assembly Hearing Needs Some Teeth to Be Meaningful

President Lee Myung-bak wasted no time giving appointment letters to three Cabinet nominees Thursday, now that their confirmation hearings have ended.

A Cheong Wa Dae spokesman said that the president didn't want to waste ``one more minute or even one more second" in these hours of economic crisis. It may make some sense as long as Finance Minister Yoon Jeung-hyun is concerned. What about Unification Minister Hyun In-taek and National Intelligence Service Director Won Sei-hoon, however? True, North Korea is heightening tensions on the Korean Peninsula, but given Pyongyang's apparently negative responses to these security chiefs, wouldn't their hasty appointment only aggravate situations?

Of course, Kim Jong-il will be playing with fire if he decides so, regardless of changes in what he might see as the working-group lineup in the South. All this has more to do with his South Korean counterpart's ways of personnel management, and more importantly, how Seoul should supplement its political institutions with corresponding maturity of consciousness to attain a true democracy.

At the Assembly hearings this week, all three officials proved that popular suspicions about their ethical and professional qualifications were right, which deepened rather than eased during the one-day session for each official. Still, the ruling party-dominated parliamentary committees wrapped them up in keeping with ``Cheong Wa Dae's schedule." Korea's legislature always plays second fiddle to the administration, but nowhere is this truer than in the relationship between the government and governing party.

Although the Assembly's extra session was going on, President Lee didn't even bother to follow the procedure of having them pass through its plenary session and instead had Speaker Kim Hyung-o directly send it to his office, a practice allowable ``only in emergency." In a way, now could be an emergency for the president, who has set up an underground ``war room" in his residential compound.

Even if the lawmakers had sent negative conclusions, these would have made little difference, however. The law on confirmation hearings stipulates that the chief executive can formally appoint Cabinet ministers or other key officials within 20 days of nomination whether the Assembly says yes or no, or even whether it holds hearings or not. Little wonder many opposition politicians and political scientists call for a revision of the law in a way that allows the Assembly panels to issue resolutions with binding power through voting, to provide the nine-year-old system with a significance to be reckoned with.

As seen in the cases of their U.S. counterparts, however, changes in laws and institutions can have meaning only when those who use them change their thinking and behavior. Three of U.S. President Barack Obama's nominees withdrew at early signs of their relatively petty breaches or misconducts. Obama himself admitted his mistakes, saying, ``I screwed it up."

In Korea, the nominees have only to endure 24 hours at the Assembly before taking up their jobs, despite numerous suspicions involving their asset formation, military services, tax evasion, double nationalities and academic plagiarism, by either denying their bad deeds or saying sorry, and receive grades from the government and its as ``having not so deadly defects as to keep them from fulfilling duty."

President Lee's signature slogan these days is to keep law and order, "even if it might cause some inconveniences for the moment."

Would it be too much to say then the abidance of law and order should start from observing proper procedure, particularly on the level of the top leader, ``even if it might cause some inconvenience for the moment for him?"

Sadly, our president seems more interested in attaining results than adopting an appropriate process before the ``opposition parties screw them all up."