Colombo
\nSri Lanka\u2019s Parliament on Thursday agreed to cut the budget of the Prime Minister\u2019s office, a move designed to hinder disputed premier Mahinda Rajapaksa whose supporters boycotted the vote amid a weeks-long political crisis that shows no sign of ending.<\/p>\n
Lawmakers opposed to Rajapaksa, who has lost two no confidence votes in Parliament, regard his administration as illegitimate and say he should not be able to use government money for his day-to-day expenses.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis means the prime minister will be dysfunctional. We will bring a similar motion tomorrow to cut down the expenditure of all other ministers,\u201d said Ravi Karunanayake, the former finance minister who proposed Thursday\u2019s motion which passed 123 to none in the 225-member parliament.<\/p>\n
Thursday\u2019s vote comes more than a month after President Maithripala Sirisena triggered the crisis by ousting former Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe and replacing him with Rajapaksa, who was then in turn sacked by parliament.<\/p>\n
Rajapaksa loyalists said Thursday\u2019s vote is illegal because there is a pending court case over whether an attempt by Sirisena to dissolve parliament on Nov. 9 is constitutional. The court is set to rule on that issue next week.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is illegal. We don\u2019t accept this as a legitimate motion,\u201d W.D.J. Seneviratne, a lawmaker in Rajapaksa\u2019s party, told Reuters before the vote.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe have informed the speaker of our position and asked him not to allow this illegal motion to take up.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Colombo Sri Lanka\u2019s Parliament on Thursday agreed to cut the budget of the Prime Minister\u2019s office, a move designed to hinder disputed premier Mahinda Rajapaksa whose supporters boycotted the vote amid a weeks-long political crisis that shows no sign of ending. Lawmakers opposed to Rajapaksa, who has lost two no confidence votes in Parliament, regard […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48764,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-world"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48763","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48763"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48763\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48765,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48763\/revisions\/48765"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}