Attorney General Gali Baharav Miara on Sunday expressed her opposition to MK Tali Gotliv’s bill that would have the Knesset elect the President of the Supreme Court. The AG wrote: “The bill severely violates core democratic values and does not meet the required legal standards.”
She did not explain why empowering democratically elected lawmakers to elect a court president is undemocratic. She likely meant that it means giving too much power to the citizens at the expense of the elites who understand stuff better.
In response, the Ministerial Legislation Committee postponed its debate on the Gotliv bill by two weeks.
This affair began in mid-December, when the High Court of Justice ordered Justice Minister Yariv Levin to assemble the Committee to Elect Judges by January 16 for a vote on the next Supreme Court President.
The court obviously expected Levin to assemble the committee in its current makeup, which is heavily slanted in favor of court president wannabe and Acting President, Judge Yitzhak Amit. But parliamentarians, especially Israelis, have a way of bypassing well-established expectations.
Enter MK Tally Gotliv (Likud), a native of Bnei Brak who worked for the state prosecution and as a defense attorney in private practice. Since her election in November 2022, Gotliv has been the loudest voice supporting judicial reform in the plenum and Knesset committees and is making speaking truth to power a contact sport.
Last week it was announced that the Ministerial Legislative Committee – the forum that guarantees coalition support to the bills it approves – this Sunday will debate MK Tali Gotliv’s bill to transfer the selection process for the President of the Supreme Court from the Committee to Elect Judges to the Knesset.
According to Gotliv’s bill, the Supreme Court President will be elected by the Knesset to a single, non-renewable term of five years. Candidates who wish to be elected will be required to submit their candidacy to the Knesset Speaker. According to the bill, the vote will be held secretly in a plenary session, and no special majority will be required to win – so that the candidate who receives the majority of the votes of the participating MKs will win.
In the event that two or more candidates receive an equal number of votes, a run-off election will be held at a special session of the Knesset to be convened the week after the date on which the first vote was held. The Knesset will hold as many rounds of voting as necessary until a decision is reached in favor of one of the candidates.
Also, according to some reports, the candidates for the court presidency won’t have to be members of the Supreme Court, or even lower court judges, or even jurists – very much in line with the rules to elect US Supreme Court justices and court presidents.
Baharav Miara argued that “The bill seeks to make a fundamental change in the process of electing the President of the Supreme Court, the head of the judiciary, so that the appointment will be by a simple majority in the Knesset, by secret ballot. It is also proposed, among other things, to limit the President’s term to five years and to allow, in certain cases, the election of a President who is not from among the Supreme Court justices.”
Ah, the humanity…
According to the AG, the proposal “does not meet the legal standards – both in terms of the immediate applicability of the arrangement, which constitutes ‘changing the rules in the middle of playing the game,’ and an abuse of constituent authority.”
“The arrangement itself violates the balance between the branches of government and will result in a serious violation of the independence of the judiciary,” the AG added.
Mind you, this is the AG who, together with the High Court of Justice, thrashed the elected lawmakers and their government’s ability to rule by revoking their decisions time and again, joining forces with the enemies of the very government she is supposed to serve, and practicing selective enforcement of laws and practices in an effort to topple the prime minister.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has been in the AG’s crosshairs for months, including her direct order to Netanyahu to fire him, responded: “What a surprise! The Attorney General publishes another report against the government and the Knesset. The right’s long years of servility to the legal junta have brought us to this shameful situation. Continue to delay firing the Attorney General, and the day will not be far off when she will determine who will serve in the government.”
He is not wrong.
