What Would the Protesters in Israel Make of America?

With protests surging in Israel, the New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, has sent readers a note on Prime Minister Netanyahu. It links to Mr. Remnick’s profile from 1998, when Mr. Netanyahu was in the first of six terms as premier. “On Thursday,” Mr. Remnick notes, “the coalition headed by Netanyahu, who is currently on trial for corruption, voted to strip the attorney general and courts of the power to remove the Prime Minister.”What strikes us about that sentence is the comparison it invites — albeit en passant — to the powers of our own government. We understand that any such comparison would be between apples and oranges, or between tangelos and plumcots. Israel is, after all, a Jewish state with a parliamentary system lacking a proper constitution. America is a constitutional republic with powers that are separated by a written and ratified constitution.America’s constitution withholds from both our attorney general and our courts the power to remove the president. We don’t see where our attorney general has the power even to investigate a sitting president. Between 99 percent and 101 percent of the executive power of the United States, after all, is vested — solely — in the president himself. Whether that allows for a special prosecutor to wheel on the president has long been in dispute.What’s not in dispute, though, is the idea that the attorney general of America and the courts have the power to “remove,” to use Mr. Remnick’s word, the president. They don’t. Neither the courts nor the attorney general can remove the president of the United States. In other words, Israel’s Knesset has just voted to make its system more like America’s, though, again, the comparison is between tangelos and plumcots rather apples and oranges. Just as an aside, in neither country do legal niceties constrain efforts by the Attorney General and the courts from their legal pursuit of a former president or former prime minister or a candidate for re-election. This is why Attorney General Garland and prosecutors in Georgia and New York are weighing against Mr. Trump charges that could come to light any day now. Once Mr. Netanyahu is out of office, he, too, would be easier to pursue.Meantime, the only way an American president can be removed is by impeachment, a power to accuse that belongs to the House and to try that belongs to the Senate.* The only role of the courts in impeachment is that the trial of a sitting president is presided over by the Chief Justice of the United States. The attorney general has no role at all; he must butt out, as the Knesset wants the attorney general to do in respect of the prime minister.It’s not our purpose in reprising all this to fault Mr. Remnick; he has as much time in grade on the Israel story as any chief editor in America. It’s merely to point out the comparison between our two systems. In America, neither the attorney general nor the courts can remove a president, even if a president were standing trial while in office — a constitutional contradiction — and even if he were somehow, while in office, convicted of a crime.Even if the Knesset were fully to enact the judicial reform Mr. Netanyahu seeks, the Knesset would retain the power to remove Mr. Netanyahu from the prime ministry. It could do so in more of a jiffy than our Congress could remove a president. Both legislatures could move fast if they were so inclined. Experience counsels caution. Every time the Senate has tried a president on impeachment, it discovered him to be — yes — “not guilty.” ___________* Except in cases where the president is unable — because of, say, a medical crisis — to perform his duties, in which circumstance a process is spelled out in the 25th Amendment.

What Would the Protesters in Israel Make of America?

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