With the extended Diet session over, the nation's political focus has shifted to the July 29 Upper House election. Regrettably, the ruling coalition of the Liberal Democratic Party and Komeito resorted to forceful Diet tactics during the extended session, depriving the Diet of chances to discuss important bills in depth.
By force of its majority, the coalition rammed through committee votes on bills to scrap the five-year time limit on pension claims and abolish the Social Insurance Agency and then got both bills enacted. In handling a bill to set up a system for regulating the future employment of retiring national public servants, whose passage was pushed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, the coalition took the exceptional step of skipping a committee vote and had the Upper House plenary session pass the bill on the basis of a report from the committee chairman.
To give the appearance of resolving the problem of money and politics, which culminated recently with the suicide of agriculture minister Toshikatsu Matsuoka, the coalition passed a bill to revise the Political Funds Control Law. But the bill obliges a politician's fund-management body to attach a receipt to its funds report only when a running expense payment exceeds 50,000 yen.
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