Did passing emergency coronavirus law kill the Knesset?
All flushed down the toilet in a period of hours on Monday.
By YONAH JEREMY BOBIsraeli protestors protest against Israeli prime minister Benjamin in Tel Aviv on July 6, 2020.(photo credit: TOMER NEUBERG/FLASH90)
After three months of careful debate about how to put some checks and balances on Shin Bet coronavirus surveillance, emergency lockdowns and other extreme disruptions of democracy and the economy, the Knesset on Monday gave up everything in a matter of hours.For three months, the Knesset Intelligence subcommittee wrestled over who could reinstate Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) surveillance of coronavirus-infected citizens and under what conditions.They hotly debated how quickly the Knesset could potentially intervene to end the program early, and they placed hard maximum deadlines so the burden would be on the executive branch to convince the Knesset to extend the program if necessary.That all went out the window in a matter of hours last week.Committee chairman Zvi Hauser had discussed multiple ideas of what he expected to do. Then he abruptly did a U-turn and notified the media the program would be reinstated immediately, and that the limits would be worked out around three weeks later.The entire point of all of the deliberations on this issue was to shift the burden to the executive branch to prove to the Knesset that the program is necessary and to put brakes on the program at multiple points.Instead, three months passed, and basically the only difference between when the executive branch started the Shin Bet program without any Knesset oversight in March and now was that now the Knesset got the “privilege” of voting away its oversight powers.The same happened on Monday regarding emergency lockdowns and a variety of other emergency powers.There were three months of discussions about who could declare an emergency, under what conditions, shortening the period for which the state could order lockdowns and forcing the executive branch to repeatedly have to justify any departure from normal laws.All flushed down the toilet in a period of hours on Monday.
Sure, the Knesset again said it will weigh in on all of these issues later. But how credible is legislative oversight when it votes through a law that allows the executive to do an end run around any of its limits?The message from the Knesset when it passed a law that lets the executive branch execute emergency powers immediately and only lets the Knesset weigh in a week later was clear: When the cards are down, we will be a rubber stamp if you need us to be.This is always a potential problem in a parliamentary democracy where the ruling majority can theoretically roll over the parliament whenever it wants.If having a second major party, Blue and White, co-governing with the Likud might have been thought to give the process a more nuanced or pluralistic character, it was hard to see what they changed.And maybe the current second wave of coronavirus required immediate action, which could not wait two or three more weeks for the Knesset deliberations to conclude.On the other hand, there had already been three months of debate and multiple weeks of escalating coronavirus cases where the executive branch basically chose not to act at all.So it seems that there was plenty of time until now to have put something together that maintained some semblance of a checks-and-balances mechanism.This means that in the end, when checks and balances were brushed aside, it was not a necessity but a choice – and one in which the Knesset was complicit.
