Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), who authored a radical bill to “pack” the U.S. Supreme Court with four additional, liberal justices, has co-sponsored a resolution opposing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s judicial reforms.
Nadler introduced his court-packing bill in 2021 before President Joe Biden’s commission had the change to study the idea. Yet he joined author Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) — who had to apologize in 2015 for attacking Orthodox Jews — in H. Con. Res. 61, which opposes Netanyahu’s judicial reform proposals, which are being debated in Israel.
All 71 of the co-sponsors of the bill are Democrats, emphasizing the partisan nature of opposition to Netanyahu.
None of Netanyahu’s proposed reforms come close to Nadler’s radical idea, which was so extreme that Democrats opposed it when President Franklin D. Roosevelt, upset at court rulings against his New Deal, tried it in the 1930s.
Many of Netanyahu’s reforms parallel existing practice in the U.S. Netanyahu has since backed away from one of the proposals, which would have allowed the legislature to overturn Supreme Court decisions by a majority vote. But he stands by the one reform that has passed thus far, which blocks the judiciary from being able to overturn laws or policies on the basis of their supposed “reasonableness.” He also wants to democratize judicial selection.
Netanyahu has faced protests from supporters of the Israeli opposition since he arrived in the U.S. this week. Recently, the Israeli opposition hired a Democrat-linked public relations firm in D.C. to push its agenda in the U.S.
Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid, who has traveled to the U.S. to drum up opposition to Netanyahu in the Jewish community, met with Nadler earlier this year. He did not address Nadler’s support for judicial reform in the U.S.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
