Rival parties Monday attempted to iron out last-minute disagreements over next year’s government budget in order to meet the constitutional deadline, set on Tuesday, as the last legal day for examining the spending plan.

Lawmakers appeared intent on meeting the due date, despite the lingering disagreements on income tax reforms threatening to derail the budget’s approval by midnight, Wednesday.

But a timely budget ratification won’t mean the beginning of the Christmas vacation season for lawmakers, as a number of draft bills remain pending, and scandals involving senior officials still loom large.

Close to 9,000 pending draft legislations are sitting idle in the National Assembly.

Lawmakers on Monday began preliminary examinations of some of those bills, with the committees on national policy, national defense, and foreign affairs convening. 

The foreign affairs and defense committees reviewed proposals to extend South Korean troop deployments in South Sudan, Lebanon, Somalia, and the United Arab Emirates. The National Policy Committee reviewed a draft legislation aiming to cut red-tape across industries Korea-wide.

Weighing heavier on the political landscape though were allegations brought by the main opposition New Politics Alliance for Democracy.

In the last few months, NPAD lawmakers have been amassing evidence to support their accusations that prominent former members of the governing Saenuri Party had made gross breaches of the law and have gone unpunished.

The NPAD’s statements often parade names such as former President Lee Myung-bak and Chung Yoon-hoi, a former senior aide to President Park Geun-hye.

Opposition lawmakers accuse Lee of overseeing wasteful government projects that have left public coffers empty. The former president’s four rivers restoration project and his “resource diplomacy” policy have been at the center of such claims.

The NPAD last week targeted Chung, who was former chief of staff to Park while she was a lawmaker in the late 1990s and early 2000s. The opposition party is mounting attacks on the ruling party and Cheong Wa Dae in connection with a scandal alleged in a newspaper on Friday.

The report contained allegations that Chung met with senior staff of the presidential office on a regular basis as part of a scheme to control key decisions.

He has been linked to Park’s decision in June to appoint Moon Chang-keuk as prime minister, an individual who was pressured into resigning after video tapes of the former journalist apparently praising Japanese imperialism surfaced.

Chung has denied the allegations, while the president called the opposition’s demands irresponsible, saying they do not have concrete evidence proving their point.

Among other outstanding issues awaiting deliberation is the so-called Kim Young-ran bill, an anticorruption bill named after the former Supreme Court Justice who initially proposed it. The bill was drafted in May but has been pending since. Reforms to public officials’ pensions, supported by the president and the Saenuri Party but opposed by the NPAD, also need to be further debated.

Floor leaders of the NPAD and the Saenuri Party are likely to order in an extraordinary session after the current parliamentary session ends Dec. 9, to discuss the allegations and address the pending draft legislations.

By Jeong Hunny (hj257@heraldcorp.com)