Thar she trumpets!

From Beyond Dots.

Another elephant or two got off the ground in Egypt, where Juan Cole notes that an administrative court has struck down the assembly writing the new constitution on the grounds that it's stacked with conservatives and hence unrepresentative:

The court relied on a 1994 law stipulating that sitting judges and parliamentarians may not be involved in constitutional revisions, lest they misuse their position to give themselves more power.

Assuming the decision stands, this means the constitution will have to wait until after the presidential election next month, meaning that the new president will take power under the old Mubarak constitution, which could mean a lot of power indeed. That could be a matter of concern, especially since there's no predicting who that president will be (another court has declared that the ultraconservative Hazem Salah Abu Ismail is qualified to run even though his mother was a US citizen because nobody had officially informed the Egyptian government about it, but this decision could easily not survive).

I'd still keep arguing that it's not the end of the world if the Muslim Brotherhood dictates the constitution (their main goal seems to be to make the presidency weak); but it has to be heartening that liberals will be more involved, especially since they seem to be acting more effective at last:

Ahmad Baha’ al-Din Shaaban, founder of the Egyptian Socialist Party, said that the country’s leftists and secularists would continue to agitate for a fair constitution whether the ruling was upheld or not.

Leftists have been mounting street protests against the constituent assembly, and gradually everyone from the Coptic Christians to the traditional clergy of al-Azhar seminary to labor unions and secularists have dissociated themselves from it. The court’s decision is the right one, and most Egyptians are breathing a sigh of relief....

Polling does not find that most Egyptians are fundamentalists, and, indeed, there is evidence that they have become more secular in the past year. Mansour Moaddel’s polls find half of Egyptians now say they are Egyptians first and Muslims second, up from 8% only a few years ago.