Members of PM’s bloc call on Edelstein to ignore High Court’s ‘impositions’

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin is among members of the right-wing religious bloc calling on Knesset Speaker Yuli Edelstein to ignore the High Court position indicating he should hold a parliamentary vote to choose a new speaker within two days.

Tourism Minister Yariv Levin at the Kfar Maccabia Hotel in Ramat Gan, on October 27, 2019. (Tomer Neuberg/Flash90)

“The court has officially taken over the Knesset, and from today the High Court has turned the Knesset speaker into a rubber stamp. There’s nothing like that in any democracy,” Levin says in a statement.

“I call on the Knesset speaker to announce that only he will determine when the plenum convenes and what will be on its agenda.”

Former justice minister Ayelet Shaked says that “only the Knesset is sovereign to decide when it convenes and when it votes, in accordance with the law.”

Her fellow Yamina party member Bezalel Smotrich, the transportation minister, similarly calls on Edelstein “not to succumb to the blatant intervention by the High Court in the Knesset’s work and refuse to accept its impositions.”