Conservative radio host and litigator Mark Levin hosted Israeli legal scholar Eugene Kontorovich on LevinTV to explain Israel’s judicial reforms, which are being falsely described by some media as a threat to democracy.
If anything, Kontorovich explains in the video, the reforms would make Israel’s government more democratic by giving the legislature some power to check the authority of the Supreme Court, which has become absolute.
Kontorovich notes that Israel’s judiciary began assuming more powers in the 1990s, including the right to reject executive appointments, review administrative decisions, and declare legislation unconstitutional in advance.
In the absence of a written constitution, Kontorovich argues, Israel’s Supreme Court has been acting as a supreme legislative body — what Levin described as a “politburo” — that largely selects its own members.
As Breitbart News has noted, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s new government is proposing four new reforms, most of which would make the Israeli judicial system more like the American judicial system.
The Israeli left has led major national demonstrations against the reforms — largely because the judiciary currently functions to enforce cultural norms and policy preferences favored by the liberal, secular elite.
Israel-born constitutional scholar Ran Hirschl has coined the term “juristocracy” to describe the global phenomenon of courts arrogating more power for themselves while claiming to defend democratic norms.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.