Joseph Muscat betrayed in himself, and by extension, his party, a failure to comprehend the meaning of democracy that is worrying in the extreme. Clearly referring to Labour's bullying motion concerning Richard Cachia Caruana, Muscat said that "no-one can be above Parliament".
He is wrong, seriously, fundamentally and blatantly wrong.
Parliament is one, and only one, of the three pillars of democracy that underpin the Rule of Law, four if you include the Fourth Estate, but let's not. The other two, just to Janet and John it for you, are the Judiciary and the Executive. Labour has a voice, and a strident one, only in Parliament, and one can only assume it is for this reason that they keep flogging the moribund pony that it is that of the three pillars that is of paramount importance.
Winning a majority in the House gives the right to form the Executive - this right is not, properly speaking, subject to the whims of individuals on an ongoing basis, which is why Constitutional conventions reserve Government permanency as subject to votes of confidence or money bills.
Overseeing the exercise of all these powers is the Constitutional Court, the one that had given so much grief to Mintoff, to the extent that, misusing his executive powers, he had suspended its operations. Slavishly parroting his master's voice, his successor Mifsud Bonnici had also said that human rights, the very basis of our Constitution, were also to be placed in abeyance while "jobs" remained to be created, going on to do just that in a desperate bid to retain power in 1987.
It's simply, and essentially, a question of balance, a balance tipping this way and that within the confines of the Constitution, the true "highest institution in the land", an institution given its power through the Constitutional (and not the ordinary) Court. All three components of the State are subject to this over-riding authority, however much Labour may bleat otherwise.
This is why Labour's "RCC Motion" is a bullying motion. Quite apart from being based on a convenient failure to understand the facts on which it is ostensibly based, it seeks to censure an individual operating within one arm of democracy by taking opportunistic advantage of what they think is a propitious sequence of events in order to embarrass the Government.
This is why their motion deserves to fail: whether it will or not depends not on its appropriateness but on whether there is true respect for the Rule of Law.