The greatest threat to democracy in America is the permanent federal bureaucracy, which in some ways resembles a giant tribunal. Uniformly leftist and certain that its judgments are superior to those of the American public, the permanent bureaucracy seeks to impose its will and, when deemed necessary, to thwart the will of officials selected by the president to run the government’s various bureaus. Even if the judgments of the bureaucrats were superior to those of the president and the electorate, the imposition of the former set of judgments would be fundamentally undemocratic.

In Israel, the greatest threat to democracy is its Supreme Court. Hating so-called right-wingers, especially deeply religious ones, with the same passion that the left in our country does, that court granted itself the power to overturn laws it deems “unreasonable.”

Thus, in Israel the test for overturning a law isn’t whether it violates a greater law — i.e. a constitution. Israel has no constitution. The test, instead, is whether a few unelected judges think the law is really, really bad.

Fed up with this blatantly undemocratic arrangement, Israel’s elected legislature passed a law to alter it. However, in Catch-22 fashion, the Supreme Court, by a vote of 12-3, asserted its power to review the “reasonableness” of this law. And by a vote of 8-7, it ruled that it was unreasonable to take away the court’s right to run Israel.