President Joe Biden should butt out of internal Israeli politics.
He is dead wrong to pressure Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail judicial reforms now roiling the Jewish homeland. The subject is none of our president's business, and he is also wrong on the substance. The reforms, which have triggered a reaction far out of proportion to their relatively mild nature, are largely sensible.
ISRAELI PARLIAMENT PASSES FIRST PART OF JUDICIAL REFORMS
Biden is also acting hypocritically. In the United States, which has a Supreme Court with far less independence than the Israeli Supreme Court, which usurped its extraordinary powers in the 1990s, Biden and the Democrats agitate for more constraints on America's highest tribunal. Biden himself, for decades, has undermined the U.S. judicial system in ways big and bigger, continuing to do so from the presidential bully pulpit by calling the court “not … normal.”
Even after Netanyahu’s reforms, the Israeli court would retain more powers and more independence than the U.S. high court that Biden and his Democratic colleagues complain is too powerful and independent. Yet when Netanyahu pushes for a modicum of accountability for Israel’s court, our president and his representatives spend months trashing the proposals and publicly undermining Netanyahu’s government.
Biden’s jawboning is, to put it mildly, not how a nation should treat one of its closest allies. What Biden is doing is unseemly and, in terms of U.S. interests, profoundly unwise.
The Biden team’s criticisms of the reforms isolate Israel diplomatically, undermining the Abraham Accords that just a few years ago advanced regional peace via friendlier, more formal relations between Jerusalem and five Muslim nations. Combined with Team Biden’s increased aid to foreign anti-Israel groups and its adoption of the Palestinian terrorists’ rhetoric against Israeli settlements in disputed territories, the president’s pressure to snuff out judicial reform looks like an attempt to turn Netanyahu into an international pariah.
This ignores the clear lesson from late last decade that when Israel is strong diplomatically, including when Netanyahu is at the helm, regional peace grows and Iran loses influence. Biden’s anti-Netanyahu activity destabilizes the region and emboldens Iran.
Meanwhile, for those fooled by the liberal media’s description of Netanyahu’s reforms as “radical,” the details show otherwise. As former U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote in February, Israel’s Supreme Court, for three decades, has been acting without “clear, objective limits.” No constitution restrains it. It wades into issues such as military tactics, Cabinet appointments, and economic policy that, in most representative democracies, are considered beyond judicial review. It often does so based not on any explicit provisions of law but merely on the judges’ sense of a policy’s “reasonableness.”
Even Aharon Barak, the former Israel Supreme Court justice who 25 years ago led the way in the court’s massive power accumulation and is a strong opponent of Netanyahu, has said eliminating the “reasonableness” standard is an acceptable change.
For comparison, imagine how Biden would squeal if he forced a tax hike through Congress, only for Justice Clarence Thomas and four colleagues to strike it down because they thought it unreasonable. Yet when Netanyahu pushes a sensible reform to eliminate such reviews, Team Biden says the prime minister is “going off the rails.” Biden specifically described Netanyahu’s government as “the most extreme I’ve seen.”
Netanyahu advances rather than curtails democratic accountability by adding two elected officials to the committee that selects new Supreme Court members. The old system gives outside attorneys and three current high court members a committee majority — meaning, Mukasey wrote, that a self-perpetuating, leftist legal establishment can “insulate itself from dissenting views.” A self-selecting judicial oligarchy free from public accountability is the antithesis of a republican government. Netanyahu is justified in wanting to modify that system.
Overall, the old system made Israel a radical outlier among true democracies, with a court uniquely unconstrained from public accountability via the selection process or scope of authority. Whether or not to rein it in, and how to do so, is a matter for Israelis to decide.
It certainly isn’t the purview of a U.S. president, much less one who, for decades, has undermined his own nation’s court system with sleazy partisan tactics.