Speaking on the Commentary magazine daily podcast on “Israel, Tik Tok, Fetterman, Banks,” journalist Matthew Continetti said the Biden administration is acting inconsistently and inattentively with respect to judicial reform in Israel.
“This is the same President Biden, who instituted a Supreme Court commission in the United States to pursue judicial reform,” said Continetti, senior fellow and chair in American prosperity at the American Enterprise Institute, some 10 minutes into the nearly hour-long podcast.
“The final report of the commission didn’t really endorse any radical changes to the Supreme Court, but still, this is a live issue in the Democratic party,” added Continetti, who is also the magazine’s D.C. columnist and founding editor and former editor-in-chief of The Washington Free Beacon. “So he’s condemning Bibi for pursuing the same policy in Israel that the progressive left would like to see pursued in the United States.”
The podcast was released hours after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the nation on judicial reform.
Biden is also “fixating” on Netanyahu and Israel at a time when protests in France—over what Continetti called French President Emmanuel Macron’s “unilateral entitlement reform, raising the retirement age on his sole authority, which is granted to him through the convoluted French constitution”—are far more violent than the ones in Israel.
“Where is the outrage from Biden?” asked Continetti.
Further, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, is “literally gutting the electoral commission as we speak, the past few weeks,” according to Continetti. “He is trying to change democracy, such as it is in Mexico, in a way that will ensure him either lifelong rule or his party.”
“Crickets,” Continetti said of the response from the Biden administration.
Earlier in the podcast, John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, said the Israeli bar association and the Supreme Court “have most of the power in choosing court nominees, and beginning in the 1990s, the Supreme Court in Israel began to arrogate itself the power of judicial review with absolutely no elected document granting them that power.”
“One can understand why you would want there to be judicial review, or there to be checks and balances in the Israeli system,” he said. “But in a system that is not an aristocracy, or in autarky or in oligarchy, some guy who has the title of Supreme Court justice, granted him by the Wizard of Oz, doesn’t get to say, ‘No. I don’t like that piece of legislation. It seems unreasonable to me. We’re not going to allow it to go forward.’”
