There's checking the Judiciary and then despotism

President William Ruto. [File, Standard]

President William Ruto's recent lashing out at the Judiciary over unfavourable rulings against his administration was beneath his office.

The demands of the rule of law state that everyone - especially an important state officer like the President - should be prepared to honour court rulings.

Public declaration by the President that he will ignore court rulings is a recipe for constitutional chaos. If anything, it is the President's fault for not taking the time to ensure that the supporting legislation for his favoured projects could withstand judicial scrutiny.

If the problem is that he gets poor advice, he should fire his legal team. It is important to establish two important facts regarding the President's newfound hostility towards the Judiciary.

First, it is not new. His predecessors were also frustrated by constraints imposed by the Constitution. That is a feature, not a bug of constitutionalism.

Second, often when presidents complain about the courts, it is because they want procedural shortcuts or to circumvent the Constitution - in which case the courts are right to stop them.

Having established the facts, the politics of the President's attack on the rule of law, look even worse.

Under normal circumstances, populist leaders attack judiciaries that represent establishment interests against popular change. That is not the case here.

The President has not credibly made clear to the general public why his administration needs to cut corners.

The failure in policy communication, coupled with the bungling of related legislative processes, make the President's utterances seem suspect.

His statements come off not as good faith interbranch balancing between the Executive and the Judiciary, but the careless statements of a would-be despot that belong in the past.

There is a very simple way for the President to avoid eroding the norms that undergird the rule of law: he should consult his legal advisors on how to pass laws that adhere to the stipulates of the Constitution. Given his coalition's numbers in Parliament, this should be fairly easy to do. He should then go out and do the political work of transparently selling his policies to Kenyans.

Doing so would give him both the legal and political ammunition he would need should his agenda be challenged in court again. Otherwise, Kenyans would be right in concluding that the President's real objective is to defang the Judiciary.

-The writer is Associate Professor at Georgetown University