An armless parliament
Historically speaking, politically immunizing His Highness the Prime Minister is not a first, and was not invented by some of the current lawmakers who announced this immunity last month after making a deal to solve some tensed issues in return for a period of political calmness. The majority of the 2012 parliament; the first to be annulled, gave the premier a similar immunity when they suspended a grilling motion planned by then MP Obaid Al-Wasmi. However, both cases prove that suspending a monitoring tool is a fatal unacceptable parliamentary mistake not only because such ‘immunization’ has no constitutional, legal, or even organizational support, but also because it is a declaration of suspending the duty of monitoring, which is the parliament’s second arm after legislation. It costs the parliament to unjustifiably lose one of its arms.
In my opinion, neither the government nor His Highness the Prime Minister should be blamed for this immunization, because if we assume that it was the government that made this offer to opposition MPs as part of a certain political deal, we should only blame those who accepted the offer, not those who made it. If what we hear is true, this deal does not indict the government. It indicts the entire parliament because it means that the opposition has turned into a temporary pro-government wing, which clearly involves an unjustified and unacceptable abdication by the entire parliament, not only the opposition.
By this, the opposition has made a political bargain without authorization from those who voted for them and thought they would achieve public gains. The people only authorized them to practice public monitoring and legislate in the name of the nation. They were not authorized to abdicate either constitutional tool. For the first time ever, the government is innocent of committing a fatal constitutional mistake for which only opposition MPs should be blamed.
The real problem does not lie in declaring the parliament’s loss of its monitoring arm through this deal, it actually lies in the fact that the parliament also suffers from paralysis in its legislative arm, as ever since it was elected, it only passed one law so far. It is more of an armless parliament. —Translated by Kuwait Times