Damning the majority... again

Yesterday, I sat in, again, on the Constituion, Justice, and Law Committee. The topic of the session was how the Knesset passes the budget. The first proposal stated, "A proposed law will pass, when dealing with budgetary issues, with at least 50 votes among Knesset Members." In other words, a simple majority is not sufficient. There could be 49 votes in favor, zero votes opposed and 71 abstentions, and the budget would not pass. From the other extreme, as worded, the 50 votes in favor of a budget proposal would pass even with an opposition of 70, as the proposal does not mention the word "majority." When I asked whether this last point was a possibility, committee chair Menachem Ben-Sasson referred me to small print in the footnotes of the bill, which states, "this majority is necessary in the first reading, the second reading, and the third reading..." A key question... Is the concept of majority not central enough, in principle and in practice, to the passage of laws the it should not be clearly specified in something so crucial as a protocol for budgetary legislation? Ben-Sasson instructed his legislative law aide to look into the matter.

This is another instance in which the concept of majority rule is either neglected or perverted. In the United States, both houses of Congress pass budget bills on the basis of simple majority. For one thing, it is unlikely that a significant number of U.S. legislators would not weigh in and vote on a budget proposal. Their constituents would not be very forgiving. So, what is the significance of the proviso of a majority consisting of at least 50 MKs? In the parliamentary coalition system that is the shame and the bane of Israeli governance, the threshold guarantees that narrow interests would be courted in order for the party with executive power to pass a budget. In the current system, minority interests and the opposition parties don't even have to coordinate a "nay" vote to defeat a budget they deem unacceptable. The implication, once again, is the very "European" Israeli perspective of not considering the national population as a single, diverse "public," but rather as separate interest groups, whose fractionating influence continues to prevent the development of a mainstream, public political majority.