Human beings in senior positions want power and authority. Judges are human beings. As such, they have ambitions. Anyone who vies for senior positions – in politics, the military, government, academia, the justice system – admits to being ambitious. In the best case, they want to promote, based on their own worldview, what they believe is necessary – justified policies and measures while also affording themselves satisfaction, prestige, and status. They want their power and authority to trump their competitors who have different agendas. Without this impulse, these people would never have reached the most senior positions.
This urge – ambition – is mostly a positive thing, as long as power isn't accumulated for oppressive purposes and doesn't lead to tyranny. Without ambition, human societies wouldn't successfully strive for and reach desired goals, led by worthy leaders. This doesn't apply strictly to the highest echelons of political power, but to professional leadership in all fields, including scientific, economic, and even intellectual.
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The democratic system doesn't aim to sterilize this impulse, rather regulate competition over resources of power and authority, channel them in constructive and non-violent directions, disperse this power to prevent tyranny, and mainly entrench and deepen the link between authority, responsibility and public oversight to establish a stable, flexible and sustainable social order.
At the heart of the democratic system is the sovereignty of the people to freely elect their representatives to mold, on their behalf, via the parliament and government, national policy, and then replace them when they are deemed to have failed or neglected this duty. Alongside the representative system is the judicial system, whose officials are not directly chosen by the sovereign entity, the people, and whose leaders are not subject to replacement.
The purpose is to balance the branches of power, prevent the elected leadership from acting arbitrarily, restrict a tyranny of the majority, and address the needs of all citizens. Because we've learned from long and bitter experience that the accumulation of unrestrained power naturally corrupts. A strong and independent judicial system is supposed to impose restraints, within the "rule of law," which are to be applied to all the leaders of the country.
The legislative, executive, and judicial branches are dependent on one another in a system of checks and balances. On these points, more or less, there is consensus.
The jurists, however, like anyone else, want more power. In the name of "rule of law" and as self-appointed representatives of said law, it's not enough for them to function as the national warning bell and, in extreme cases, to slam the brakes on the other branches to avoid an accident. Some of them want to be in the driver's seat or, at least, to have their hands on the wheel. In the name of "rule of law," some of the state's attorneys and Supreme Court justices want veto power over the destination and any other decision, small and big alike.
Such ambition is legitimate but in a democratic regime, the sovereign entity – the people – must be persuaded. These individuals must be elected and subjected to the will of the people, who will examine their character and performance and remove them if they've failed. And mainly: They must take responsibility for the consequences of their decisions and persuade the Israeli public that their pursuit of one worthy goal won't detract from other worthy goals in such a manner that disrupts the overall national balance.
Some of the judges and their do-bidders have not been willing, in recent decades, to pay this price. They want the license and keys to the car without passing the public's driver's ed "test," without the option of having their license revoked if they consistently get into accidents and without having to take responsibility for choosing poor destinations.
And the way they achieve all these goals is to abuse the authority the public has put in their hands. The authority to consult has been distorted into an authority to dictate, and the authority to judge has been distorted into an authority to govern. The public has conferred upon them the authority to curtail governmental arbitrariness perpetrated by ambitious politicians, and they've used it instead to impose legal arbitrariness they themselves have perpetrated on account of their own ambitions.
Because no one oversees their conduct, similar to how they – rightly – oversee the legislative and executive branches, they have "legislated" for themselves, through their legal precedents, a super-status of ultimate real-time arbiter over every political decision without bearing responsibility for the outcomes. The motivations of some senior officials in the judicial system, the principles of the political mechanisms, and the special circumstances that allow these officials to behave this way, are important to outline in general, broad strokes – even at the expense of losing some of the nuances. This will be the subject of my following articles.
