Justice Minister Yacov Ne'eman is pushing forward with the idea of splitting up the duties of the Attorney General. The idea is perfectly obvious and natural since there is a clear conflict between heading the state's prosecution apparatus (which is often used against members of government) and serving as the government's legal adviser and lawyer.
The left is resisting the split since the AG is effectively appointed by the left (the search committee is headed by a retired SC Justice who is appointed by the Chief Justice) and is generally beholden to the Court if he wants to get appointed to it one day (as were Zamir, Shamgar, Barak and Rubinstein). Thus, the left always wants the AG to run the country, which in fact he generally does. This is because the threat of prosecution that he wields effectively turns his advice into a command.
Anyway, Ofir Pines and a few of his Labor colleagues sent a letter to the head of their party, Ehud Barak, demanding that Barak oppose the proposal to split the AG's duties. The letter is the usual string of platitudes and shallow pieties one expects from the likes of Pines, but it contains one line that deserves immortality.
"The splitting of the duties of the AG will lead to the shattering of the status of the AG, will bring about dangerous politicization of the functioning of the government and will deal a mortal blow to the rule of law."
You've got to be asking yourself: who should be doing politics if not the government? How does one politicize it and why is that dangerous?
The answer to these questions is that if you represent a small minority of the voters but you think that you are the sole defender of absolute justice and therefore ought to be running the country anyway, representative democracy really is a bad thing.
Read that sentence again, mentally replacing the word "politicization" with "democratization" and you'll understand the workings of the Bolshevik mind.
(Next up, I hope to write about a law I'm drafting to deal with NGOs that get money from foreign governments to meddle in Israeli politics. )
baruch haboo "vee bisti gevezen biz yetst" please write about more yiddishe zachen (for the uneducated)
ReplyDeleteyoeli from kj
how do you figure 'small minority?' we are talking labor+kadima, and probably others to the left. this is far from a small minority.
ReplyDeletei think the real "test" here is not whether or not the job function gets changed, but whether or not Nitzan Shai gets the job. If he gets it it means that little has changed and that the Likud of Bibi is really still the Likud of Begin insofar as its relationships to the "elites". Even though there is an "independent" search committee, the gov't still has the final say and they can reject such a choice.
ReplyDelete