Jeong Jeom-sik: “The moment an impeachment motion against Cho Hee-dae is introduced, Lee will be a lame duck ... The public will call for impeachment”

[Financial News] Jeong Jeom-sik, floor leader of the People Power Party, warned on the 16th about the Democratic Party of Korea’s push to impeach Chief Justice Cho Hee-dae, saying, “The moment an impeachment motion is introduced, the president will become a lame duck,” and “The public will rise up and call for Lee Jae-myung’s impeachment.”
At a meeting on parliamentary audit preparations at the National Assembly that day, Jeong said, “If the DPK is so confident, go ahead and impeach Chief Justice Cho,” making the remarks.
He also criticized Government Legislation Minister Woncheol Cho’s explanation at the National Assembly Legislation and Judiciary Committee’s parliamentary audit the previous day that the Chief Justice’s authority to recommend Supreme Court justices was “a kind of recommendation and proposal,” saying it “grotesquely distorts the Constitution” and was “a textbook case of distorting scholarship to curry favor.”
He continued, “What the president is doing now is not simply demanding a re-nomination, but forcing the nomination of Judge Kim Min-gi,” and criticized Minister Cho for “insisting that what is unconstitutional is a constitutional duty.” He added, “If Zhao Gao, who gave us the tale of calling a deer a horse, had seen Minister Cho, he would have turned away, saying, ‘There’s a more ruthless sycophant than me.’”
He blamed the government’s stock-market support policies for the sharp, simultaneous drops in the KOSPI and KOSDAQ indexes the previous day.
Jeong said, “The current situation is the result of the ‘normalization of the abnormal’ brought about by the Lee Jae-myung government,” adding, “The costly bill has come due for recklessly propping up the stock market—even rushing to introduce single-stock leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and forcibly postponing the National Pension Service’s rebalancing.”
He again blamed the government, saying, “At the root of the turmoil in the stock market is the government’s abnormal stock-market policy: it made boosting the market a national policy goal and went all in on it.”
He also raised the issue of adjusting the National Pension Service’s allocation to domestic stocks. Jeong said, “I hear that 181 trillion won in National Pension Service funds evaporated during the stock-price plunge last July,” and declared, “Using the people’s retirement funds to prop up the stock market as if they were the regime’s private purse is a serious crime.”
He also said he would pursue a full investigation into the facts surrounding the reasons for and responsibility for the delay in the National Pension Service’s rebalancing, using every means available, including a parliamentary investigation and a special counsel probe.

[email protected] Kim Gyeong-min Reporter