Taiwan’s voters sent representatives to the legislature to do a difficult, often unglamorous job: make laws, oversee the executive and govern within the Constitution. What they did not elect was a permanent troupe of political performers, staging confrontations with no realistic legal endgame and little interest in governing outcomes.
Yet that is precisely what a growing number of lawmakers — particularly within the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) — are choosing to become.
The impeachment push against President William Lai (賴清德) and the proposal to use referendums to override Constitutional Court rulings might appear unrelated. They are not. They share the same strain of politics: actions that cannot succeed within the constitutional system, pursued anyway for their ability to damage legitimacy, inflame resentment and keep political conflict alive.
Take impeachment first. Everyone involved understood the thresholds. Removing a president requires supermajorities the opposition simply does not have — including two-thirds of the Legislative Yuan and the Constitutional Court.
While the opposition can initiate hearings and stretch the process out for months, the rules are clear and the numbers are not there.
The process moves forward anyway, loudly and theatrically. The goal is not removal. It is reputational damage — to weaken the presidency, signal outrage and keep the country in a state of permanent confrontation.
We see the same logic applied to the Constitutional Court.
Faced with rulings they dislike — particularly on quorum and legislative procedure — the KMT and TPP lawmakers are proposing to amend the Referendum Act (公民投票法) to allow Constitutional Court judgements to be overturned by popular vote. It is important to be clear about what this means: an ordinary statute is being asked to nullify the Constitution itself.
A referendum cannot override the Constitution, nor can it overrule the court entrusted with interpreting it. Once the Constitutional Court has ruled, the constitutional process ends. Anything that follows is political theater, not law.
The proposal advances. Why? Because, like impeachment, it does not need to succeed legally to succeed politically.
“Let the people decide” is a powerful slogan. It sounds democratic. It flatters voters. It reframes constitutional limits as elite obstruction. Beneath that rhetoric lies a dangerous inversion: turning constitutional democracy — rule through agreed constraints — into raw majoritarian pressure.
This is not how lawmakers behave when their goal is governance.
Real lawmakers respond to adverse rulings by revising legislation, building consensus, or — if the issue is truly fundamental — pursuing constitutional amendments through the demanding processes the Constitution itself requires. They accept defeats because they understand that restraint is the price of a system that protects everyone, including future minorities.
Political actors do something else. They keep pushing motions they know cannot work. They escalate conflict after losing. They treat institutions not as frameworks to operate within, but as stages to perform upon.
Their aim is not to resolve problems, but to delegitimize referees and exhaust the public.That is the pattern Taiwan is watching unfold.
Democracies do not survive on procedure alone. They survive on role discipline — on the shared understanding that not everything legally possible should be pursued, and that losing within the system is not the same as the system being illegitimate.
When lawmakers repeatedly blur that distinction, damage accumulates. Courts begin to appear partisan. Constitutional limits come to be seen as optional. Governance recedes as narrative warfare takes center stage.
Major initiatives stall, society drifts and the same actors then step forward to assign blame — accusing the ruling party of incompetence, authoritarianism or arrogance.
Institutions do not collapse all at once. They erode through repeated stress tests that were never meant to be tests in the first place.
This is not a call for silence or submission. Opposition is essential to democracy. Oversight is necessary. Dissent is healthy.
However, there is a line between opposition that seeks to govern and opposition that seeks only to abuse the rules and paralyze the government.
Taiwan did not elect performers to keep the constitutional system in perpetual conflict. It elected lawmakers to govern within it. When elected officials choose theatrics over law, confrontation over responsibility and sabotage over governance, voters should take note — and vote them out.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong living in Taiwan.
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