Tel-Chai Nation

The Jerusalem Post has an article about all the trouble the Israeli supreme court's caused over the years that needs desperately to be changed:

Edelstein’s accusation that the High Court of Justice is "harming the principle of majority rule, which is one of the bases of democracy," and has struck "a mortal blow to the Knesset as an independent branch" of government, echoes criticisms that have been heard for years from his colleagues on the Right.

The seed was planted way back in the mid-1980s when the High Court of Justice began to expand its concept of who has standing and what cases are justiciable. People without a direct interest in a case could petition the court on the grounds that they are of public interest.

At the same time, the court developed a new standard in its judgments on government decisions: reasonability. If the court thinks a government decision is "extremely unreasonable," it becomes illegal – regardless of whether the written law addresses the situation or not.

Then came the 1992 "constitutional revolution," when the Knesset under a Likud-led coalition passed human rights laws Basic Law: Human Dignity and Liberty and Basic Law: Freedom of Occupation. Supreme Court president Aharon Barak declared that basic laws have constitutional ascendancy, though Israel has never had a constitution.

All of this added up to Israel having a highly activist judiciary.

For most of those years, judges were largely self-selecting; politicians were on judicial selection committees, but there were not enough of them to have a decisive influence until fairly recently. Activist judges often selected other activist judges, and those with more conservative views on how the judiciary should behave were in the minority.

Read the whole item, and understand why something needs to be done about a leftist-dominated judiciary.

Labels: Israel, Knesset, Moonbattery