eviscerating checks and balances
where now?
Each country has unique features to its form of government. Some are cherished while others merely tolerated. Governing is rarely a simple task regardless of the form it takes.
Our Constitutional Convention, a crucial four month gathering over the summer of 1987, started ostensibly to revise the Articles of Confederation which had poorly served the thirteen original states for the first four years of our nation. The process of hammering out a set of institutions and interactions between those institutions, weighing citizen voices and responsibilities along with the concept of checks and balances dominated that 1787 Convention.
The United States has an especially complex intertwining of various levels and branches of government to prevent a minority from erasing the will of a majority. The Founders never envisioned the current conditions of a former president indicted for actions egregiously straining the credibility of those institutions but the Founders did created this intricate check and balance system which appears still functioning as it confronts both doubters and supporters.
The Judicial, Legislative, and Executive branches each have a role delineated in greater or lesser detail by Constitutional Articles, have powers checked by the other two branches. The infamous ‘line item veto’, a long-vaunted solution to the budget growing exponentially over the years, was a perfect example of the balance within the system. Governors in many states have the opportunity, granted by their state constitutions, to mark through certain budget lines with no further conversation required. The affected state legislatures may resent their governors’ power to overruled them with the stroke of a pen, having to find a more persuasive argument for the expenditure or finding it payable in another line of the budget.
Presidents of both parties longed for such a power because it would have allegedly have neutured Congress’s (opposition party controlled, of course) appetite for ‘wasteful’ spending or because the specific programs involved confronted the President’s policy priorities. In 1996, the Congress passed the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 (Public Law 104-130) to provide precisely that authority.
President Clinton vetoed funding later that same year. Almost immediately the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Law as unconstitutional since Article 1 enunciates how spending bills originate (in the House of Representatives) and how they move through our system. The President’s sole role is the sign or veto the entire bill when it reaches the Oval Office; determining specific budget items undesirable violated the check and balance of Congress initiating spending and the President accepting or vetoing in his role as Chief Executive—checks and balances in action.
This cherished, delicate balancing of the U.S. branches of government is under threat from multiple actors. But Israel’s Knesset yesterday completely obliterated the sole institution able to curb the Prime Minister, voting 64-0 revise the Basic Law, including ending Supreme Court autonomy. Not a single opposition Knesset member voted at all. This breathtaking seizure of power by the tainted Prime Minister completely empowered that office. With its Parliamentary system, the Prime Minister is a consequential institution, its power resulting from being the elected head of the Legislature from the majority (almost invariably a coalition government) who runs the government.
In American terms, the Prime Minister rendered anyone who opposes him irrelevant in the country. Arab Israelis, constituting roughly 21% of the 8.8 million living in the Jewish state, have long found their participation in the political system difficult, particularly as more religious and conservative elements of the Jewish population asserted themselves politically in the past quarter century. The evisceration of the Supreme Court’s role in the process weakens all minority (Muslim, Christian, and any other non-Jews) rights considerably.
Prime Minister Binjamin Netanyahu, already under indictment for bribery and political corruption questions during multiple terms as Prime Minister, ignored the tens of thousands of Jews who protested this proposal for months. He discarded warnings from the Israeli Defense Forces that this fracturing of the public undermined readiness and substantially threatened the security of the small nation tucked among states often rejecting its very existence.
Netanyahu, in coalition with religious parties seeking to dislodge Israel from its secular roots of the early twentieth century as a nation welcoming Jews from the Diaspora, now appears immune to challenges. He has de facto dictatorial power within the Israeli system as long as he is able to satisfy his right-wing partners who support him in office. At 73, Bibi could remain in office for another twenty years if he lives that long and manages to hold his coalition together. To achieve that feat, he will be ever more mindful of the coalition members’ demands, often excluding any policies outside a narrowly religious interpretation of Jewish theology.
Additionally, the far right exacerbates the long-standing ethnic divisions between Jews and Palestinians by building further controversial, in the eyes of many non-Israelis, settlements to reinforce Jerusalem’s control over the West Bank. These controversial communities only exacerbate global condemnation while creating violence within Israeli society as they have since the 1967 War which led to Israel’s control over the territories. The actions of Netanyahu’s coalition partners remain concerning according to many around the world, long raising questions of the true nature of democracy in Israel.
In short, the Knesset vote yesterday most likely ended Israel’s three quarters of a century with the sole democratic government in the Middle East. The irony of the Jews from the Pale and the bloody regimes of central Europe making aliyah to Israel to build a democratic state seeing their legacy destroyed to ensure one single individual has the unfettered opportunity to retain political power must be hard for many in Israel today.
Things happen. A war could show the effects on public support that the IDF officials raised forcing a reversal but that would be ugly for all.
Netanyahu’s recent heart problems could end his personal dreams to remain in power. The law, however, now could pave the way for even more conservative right-wing parties to impose their ever narrowing vision of political participation on the nation if Bibi were to leave now.
Israel is now a much wealthier state that it was in its early years but heavily tied to U.S. financial assistance amounting to $3 billion annually. Most analysts see that as an unbreakable bond yet some voices in the country still ask whether an Israel with increasingly anti-democratic trends is as important as it was.
For most Jews, Israel is a place of pride in its accomplishments coupled with refuge from a world anti-Semitism, a dangerously rising phenomenon worldwide. Yet Israel’s right-wing religious threats to redefine The Right of Return, the welcome to Jews from around the globe who seek to return to the Biblical territory containing a state for the religion’s survival. The relgious parties want to grant return only of those Jews who meet strict criteria. Many contemporary Israelis, converts or the children of mixed religious marriages, would not qualify as Jews, according to the religious right which advocates excluding these people from the automatic welcome ‘back’ to the nation.
Christian Fundamentalists in the United States deeply support Israel for its Biblical connections. Yet they are a diminishing portion of the U.S. electorate so their political power for the long-term is less clear. Those in the United States of Muslim background are also growing in number, pressuring the ironclad support in America for Israel. In short, the future of U.S. ties to this closest of allies is not a guarantee as it was for decades.
Ultimately, the United States will have to confront this non-democratic state of affairs. The shared democratic link between the two countries has been fraying because of trends here and in Israel so how will that frayed understanding of each other’s interests, commitments, threats, and supporters affect the link between our two nations?
The Knesset vote is a political earthquake for Israel and probably for the entire region, if not the world. Where it will take Israel long-term is unclear but worrisome. Then again, we have much to work through in our own system on similar questions of checks and balances. Nothing is a given.FIN