Justice Minister Yariv Levin is considering not responding to the High Court of Justice regarding a petition demanding the revoking of the reasonability amendment that was recently added to the Basic Law: The Judiciary. The court on Wednesday placed an injunction on the law pending a hearing, and according to sources in Likud, Levin is concerned that his response to the injunction would constitute his de facto approval of the court’s power to revoke a basic law.
Should Levin decide to respond, he would likely not use the good services of Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, a plant of the previous government who has been busy sabotaging practically every move of the Netanyahu government. Yariv would probably hire an independent attorney.
On Wednesday evening, an expanded panel of 15 High Court Justices was assembled to hear petitions against the amendment to the Basic Law: The Judiciary, and issued an injunction against the reasonability amendment, and set a hearing date for the various petitions on September 12. In their decision, the judges stressed that they were issuing the inunction “for reasons of efficiency in handling the petitions and for those reasons only, without it being an expression of a position on the substance of things.”
Of course, they did. But anyone who has followed supreme court injunctions anywhere in the Western world knows that by issuing an injunction the court recognizes the validity of the petition and that from that point on the burden is on the respondent to prove why their decision shouldn’t be annulled.
In other words, the fix is in.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who has faced the Supreme Court many times as a very successful attorney, attacked the High Court’s decision, saying: “The decision to issue an injunction in a petition against the law reducing the reasonability clause is a fairly transparent conduct of the Supreme Court which skips steps and works in every way to accept the petition to revoke a basic law.
“Many feel that many of the judges who will be hearing the petition have already decided in effect how they would rule on it. For the public’s trust in the judicial system to increase, it would have been appropriate for the court not to cut short the proceedings and to allow an honest debate,” Ben Gvir said.
The main reason the court is skipping all those nice proceedings has to do with the burgeoning ego of Queen Esty (Right-Wing Israelis Deliver Bananas to Justice Hayut on Becoming Esty the Banana Republic Queen), whose ego demands that the issue be decided in favor of the anti-government hordes before she leaves office in October.
Have a banana.
