Catching Up On The News - Unconstitutional Elections

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Something huge happened yesterday.

In a footnote to my post of yesterday, I noted that NHK announcer Okoshi Kensuke last Thursday confronted Prime Minister Noda Yoshihiko with the bald fact that the current map of the House of Representatives districts is unconstitutional, rendering an election impossible on technical grounds. While the Prime Minister had no alternative but to concede that the current map is unconstitutional, he dodged the thrust of Okoshi's question, saying that the Diet had too many important and difficult issues before it for anyone to be discussing a dissolution and an election at this time.

Noda had been, until the live NHK interview, careful to not get cornered on the question of the constitutionality of holding an election. He had left it up to Koshi'ishi Azuma, the Democratic Party of Japan's secretary-general, to tell the seemingly bone-headed members of the political press over and over again that since the issue of the disproportionality of a single vote (ippyo no kakusa) had not been resolved in accordance with the standards set down by the Supreme Court judgment of March 2011, no House of Representatives elections could take place.

While any position aside from the one Koshi'ishi has taken is ludicrous -- unconstitutional meaning “contrary to the basic law of the land, the law upon which all other laws are based” -- Noda has been careful to preserve the notion that the holding of an election is a matter of opinion -- his opinion -- rather than a matter of law.

The reason Noda has needed to maintain this fallacy is simple: his power to call an election is the whip he needs to keep the followers of former DPJ party leader Ozawa Ichiro in line. Nothing terrifies the Ozawa-vetted first termers like the possibility being plunged into an election. With the disdain the public has at present for the DPJ and perhaps permanently for Ozawa, each and every one of these Ozawa acolytes would be wiped out.

Perversely, the opposition Liberal Democratic Party and the New Komeito have aided Noda in the maintenance of this illusion. The leaders of both the LDP and the New Komeito know just as well as anyone else that elections are impossible if the districts are unconstitutional. Nevertheless they have been calling for elections for two years straight. And why not? It is the biggest free lunch in history. The public opininon polls on the level of public support for the LDP and the New Komeito could find that both have 0% support and it would not matter: the two parties would still call for elections.

Noda, for his part, tacitly used opposition demands for elections as a means of bolstering the illusion he has wished to preserve. If the opposition is demanding elections, it stands to reason that the opposition at least believes elections can be held.

Hence the sound of breaking glass yesterday when LDP Secretary-General Ishihara Nobuteru asked Prime Minister Noda, in special Diet Committee session, whether in fact the failure to correct the disproportionality of votes in the electoral districts put a shackle on the right to dissolve the Diet. Noda replied that no, failure to act did not shackle the right and that elections would be held when they he thought they were needed. (J)

Technically, both men are correct. Following through on Ishihara's thought, a dissolution of the Diet would trigger the implementation of Article 54 of the Constitution, which states that following a dissolution of the Diet, an election must be held within 40 days. Since the current electoral districts have been ruled unconstitutional, and the Diet would no longer be in existence to fix them, the election would a priori be void.

As for Noda's insistence that the right to dissolve the Diet is not compromised, his position is true only via the most painstaking of hairsplitting. The right to dissolve the Diet, held by the Emperor but exercised upon the advice of the Prime Minister, is not compromised until the moment the right is exercised, at which point the country would be blasted out into extraconstitutional space.

While the constitutional implications of this conundrum are fascinating*, what was of immense political importance in Ishihara's question was that unless the LDP tries to pull off the same trick that the DPJ has been pulling -- i.e., having the party secretary-general insisting that holding a House of Representatives election is impossible while the party president maintains that it is not -- the delicate minuet Noda and the opposition have been dancing together has come to a sudden stop. If a gaggle of reporters corner LDP president Tanigaki Sadakazu and press him on whether or not Ishihara's question means the LDP now believes holding elections is unconstitutional, chances are the not terribly swift-thinking Tanigaki will not have an intelligible response.

If and when Tanigaki flubs his moment in the spotlight, the political game board will become completely scrambled, just when Ozawa Ichiro, the master of Go (Part 1 and Part 2) is set to meet with the prime minister. (J)

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* The current emperor, being the conscientious, cautious but independent-thinking man that he is, would likely, on the most perfect of legal grounds, toss post-1945 precedent into the dustbin by refusing the prime minister's request for a dissolution.

Just What The Heck Did They Think They Were Doing?

PLEASE WAIT LOADING ,,,,,,,,, Yesterday, a leak of huge proportions sailed through the halls of Nagata-cho, the home of Japan's national legislature and the various offices attached to the prime minister: PM Noda Yoshihiko and head of the opposition, Liberal Democratic Party President Tanigaki Sadakazu, had had a secret one-on-one meeting in a Tokyo hotel on February 25. (E)

Both men inexplicably denied that the meeting had taken place. While certainly both of them face very difficult reelection campaigns in the fall -- ones where they will be challenged by forces within their parties extremely unhappy with the way each has been handling party and Diet affairs -- and the news of a secret meeting would only inflame the passions of those opposed to their respective party leaderships --denying what everyone knew to be true seems, at this point, the height of folly.

Just what the two could have been discussing in secret is the subject of wild speculation. The most common supposition is that the two were discussing a quid pro quo: passage of the bill raising the consumption tax in return for an early dissolution of the Diet. This "discussion dissolution" (hanashiai kaisan) has been a favorite proposal of LDP party elders and conservative members of the commentariat in recent weeks. That the LDP had been chattering about it so much was unsurprising, given that the period of time during which the prime minister could dissolve the Diet and call and election without provoking a constitutional crisis was rapidly closing.

Unfortunately for this theory, the timing of the meeting does not neatly match up with the schedule of the constitutional problem with a House of Representatives election. The meeting was held in the evening on February 25. This was also the last day that the House of Representatives could be dissolved without an unchallengeable unconstitutionality of the current electoral map. Basically, the two would have to agree with a three-step process: the passage of a bill fixing the unconstitutionality of the electoral map, then bring together elements of each of their two parties together to vote for the tax increase, followed by a Noda's exercising his right to unilaterally dissolve the Diet. Seeing as neither Noda nor Tanigaki has enough support within his party to drag their colleagues into this scheme -- the DPJ's proposed reform of the House of Representatives cutting far too many of the House of Representatives' proportional seats for the LDP's ally the New Komeito to swallow -- made the entire subject moot.

If the two were not talking about a hanashiai kaisan over the consumption tax, what could they have been talking about? Another line of speculation is that Noda was testing Tanigaki's willingness to fashion a broad, even if only a loose, coalition government of fiscal conservatives to oppose the internal challenge Noda faces from Ozawa Ichiro. With the tossing out of the most damning piece of evidence in Ozawa's accounting irregularities trial on February 17, Ozawa has been on a tear to reestablish himself as the most important power broker within the DPJ. In his most stunning step outside the boundaries of his comfort zone, he agreed to a long interview with The Asahi Shimbun, outlining his opposition to nearly everything the Noda government is trying to achieve. Since Ozawa agrees to mainstream media interviews less frequently than Japan changes prime ministers, this was a sign that he feels himself now nearly bulletproof in intra-party infighting, even as his membership in the DPJ remains formally under suspension. Given his propensity to take his followers out of a party when he feels slighted, and that so many of the DPJ's first-termers and even middle-ranking members are terrified that a rise in the consumption tax condemns them to electoral annihilation, the number of folks Ozawa could take with him has swelled from the estimates of 50 or so prevalent a few months ago. He could conceivably take half the DPJ with him, given the results of the September 2010 leadership election between Ozawa and Kan Naoto. (J)

Whatever the two may have been discussing, that they should meet should not be such a big deal. Leaders meet in secret all the time, feeling out where the other really wants go out, away from the extremism that the camera lights bring out in every politician. This is particularly the case for Tanigaki, who has been forced to cling to a hopeless strategy of saying "No" to everything the DPJ has proposed, a stance which has exasperated certain of the clearer thinking members of the LDP. True, meeting in secret just four days before the two were heading into a clash of the titans Question Time session looks like match-fixing. However, given the way that Prime Minister Noda pummeled Tanigaki in the February 29 session, it seems hardly likely the pair had agreed to treat each other with kid gloves.

So why the denials regarding the meeting? Credibility is a far more precious currency than consistency. So you went behind your colleagues' back to find out what the other side is willing to give up -- so what? Lying in public -- that is fatal.

There was in a time when if the Chief Cabinet Secretary, the government's main spokesman, would say something is true or not true, that was the end of the discussion. Secret agreements on the return of Okinawa to Japanese sovereignty? They do not exist. But there are copies in the U.S. National Archives! That is irrelevant, they do not exist.

We do not live in such a time anymore. Indeed, under the DPJ-led coalition government, the heretofore non-existent Okinawa agreements were shown to have existed. That something was secret cannot be denied when the secret gets out.

So for the increasingly pathetic and irrelevant Fujimura Osamu to insist that the meeting never took place is the pretty much same as a confimation that it did.