At the 50th session of the National Assembly Standing Committee, Chairperson Trần Thanh Mẫn voiced his frustration with the government, stating that the legislature is often placed in a fait accompli during the lawmaking process. He criticized the government's practice of submitting documents at the last minute, sometimes in the afternoon, before they were scheduled for a vote.
“At present, if we strictly follow the Law on Promulgation of Legal Normative Documents, we can’t get anything done—the timeline just doesn’t allow it,” Mẫn remarked. He elaborated with a literary analogy: “At least three to five days are needed. We are not the Monkey King from Journey to the West—you cannot send the documents this afternoon and expect us to study and vote on them by tomorrow.”
His candid, down-to-earth language appeared to unsettle the political establishment. Thanh Niên newspaper, after initially publishing his full remarks, quickly edited its article to remove many of them. A reporter from Luật Khoa Magazine archived the original, unaltered version before the changes were made.
The chairperson’s account reveals a flaw in Việt Nam’s legislative process: the routine omission of impact assessments for laws that affect over one hundred million people. Mẫn explained that due to impossibly tight deadlines, major projects are drafted and passed in haste, stating simply that “there isn’t enough time” for proper evaluation.
While government bodies continue to debate, it is the public that bears the consequences of these flawed regulations. This dynamic is captured in a proverb from Zhuangzi’s Nanhua Classic—“the mantis stalks the cicada, unaware of the sparrow behind.” The government’s focus on speed deprives the legislature of time for deliberation, leading to poorly planned laws that catch citizens off guard, leaving them unable to adapt or prepare for new policies.
In the past year, citizens were given just five days to comply with Decree 168/2024 on traffic management, and business households had only one month to prepare for new tax rules under Decree 70/2025. Similarly, a plan to ban 450,000 motorbikes from Hà Nội’s inner Ring Road 1 gave owners only a few months to find alternatives.
As Chairperson Mẫn lamented, the National Assembly is hardly as gifted as the Monkey King, who could leap 84,000 miles in the blink of an eye. Yet over the past year, it has displayed its own kind of magic—swiftly producing one lightning-fast regulation after another.
This trend is set to continue in the upcoming 10th session, as the National Assembly prepares to fast-track 50 draft laws. Once again, citizens will be left on the sidelines of the democratic process, with no time to respond and barely enough to even grasp what is coming. In the end, it is always the people who suffer, left without the time or means to adapt to a government whose hasty decisions change as swiftly as they are conceived.
Bối Thủy wrote this article in Vietnamese and published it in Luật Khoa Magazine on Oct. 15, 2025. The Vietnamese Magazine has the copyright of its English version.
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