The Knesset will hold its final votes on the reasonableness standard bill beginning on Monday at 12:00 p.m., the coalition-led Knesset Home Committee decided on Wednesday.
The debate over the bill will begin at 10:00 a.m. on Sunday, and the opposition will have 26 hours straight to lay out its objections.
The over 27,000 objections will then be shrunk to a maximum of 140 votes. This is expected to take a number of hours, and if no changes are made to the wording of the bill and if the discussion is not delayed, it is expected to pass at some point on Monday afternoon.
The coalition initially planned to hold a three-hour recess after the 26-hour debate, but opposition Home Committee members argued that the recess would mean that the entire coalition would simply await the end of the debate before making its way to the Knesset. Home Committee chairman MK Ofir Katz (Likud) agreed to cancel the recess, meaning that voting will begin immediately after the debate ends.
The opposition may attempt at some point during the debate a parliamentary trick in which they suddenly drop all remaining objections. In this scenario, a minister, who does not have limited speaking time on the Knesset dais, will need to give a prolonged speech until the coalition ensures that it has the necessary number of votes present for the bill to pass.
Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu continued to hold consultations on Wednesday regarding a watered-down version of the bill, based on a proposal laid out by distinguished law professor Yedidia Stern and former deputy attorney-general Raz Nizri in an article in Yediot Ahronot earlier this week. In an interview on KAN radio on Wednesday, Stern said that the proposal was being considered "seriously," but that political considerations and a lack of trust between the coalition and opposition mean that the chances of the proposal being accepted are unknown.
What does the original draft say?
The proposal on the table is that the bill will apply only to decisions made by the cabinet as a whole. This means that appointments or policy decisions made in the cabinet will be immune from application of the reasonableness standard but the standard will still apply regarding decisions made by individual ministers. If the decisions by individual ministers are on policy matters which are then ratified in the cabinet – they, too, will be exempt from the application of the reasonableness standard.
With regard to governmental appointments, Stern and Nizri's proposal is that appointments that require the Knesset's approval, such as appointments of ministers, will also be immune to the reasonableness standard, but appointments that do not require the Knesset's approval, such as director's general of government ministries or senior bureaucratic positions, will be subject to review via the reasonableness standard.
Stern and Nizri also wrote that Netanyahu must also declare publicly, in Hebrew, that no other judicial reform legislation will pass with the support of the coalition alone.
Although the Knesset Constitution Committee was expected to finish preparing the bill's wording on Wednesday evening, the changes laid out by Stern and Nizri appear in some of the objections proposed, and therefore the Knesset plenum can still insert the changes by accepting the relevant objections.