More judicial tyranny

After the resignation of the Police Chief, the Internal Security Minister, Avi Dichter, appointed Yaakov Ganot as his replacement. Yaakov Ganot has a problematic past where he was indicted for bribery and although acquitted came out of the whole story looking very bad. Based on this, the good government groups immediately ran to the Supreme Court asking it to cancel the appointment. Everyone agrees that from a purely formal legal perspective the appointment is legal. If so, how can the Supreme Court get involved? The Supreme Court under Aharon Barak decided that everything is judiciable and that the Supreme Court can decide that the government's actions were unreasonable. There is no way to describe this except as judicial dictatorship. The elected government makes a decision based on their judgment of what is best and comes the Supreme Court and substitutes it's judgment and says that the decision was unreasonable. Why should the opinion of unelected judges hold more weight then the man elected and charged with the responsibility?

With regards to Yaakov Ganot, the Minister, Avi Dichter, whose responsibility it is to pick the Police Chief, decided that Ganot is the best candidate for the job. One of the fundamentals of representative democracy is that the people elect representatives who are supposed to use their judgment in running the government. Basically what the petitioners are saying is that based on our judgment we think he is a bad candidate and we would not have appointed him. The problem is that Avi Dichter was elected to apply his judgment as to what is best, if you don't like it run for the Knesset.

The only ray of light is that the mainstream newspapers have published a number of opinion pieces over the past few days (for example לגנות את בג"ץ גנות ) agreeing with my position here. Maybe now with the retirement of Aharon Barak we will see a return to sanity by the Supreme Court.