Picking your battles

Dr M will have his way, especially when he's got the Constitution on his side.

I was going to write a piece about how the constitutional crisis that didn't happen but someone else wrote a better version of it so I'll just highlight the salient points of that article, which appeared in The Malaysian Insight. This is not the first time I was beaten to the punch. There are lots of good opinion pieces out there!

If you don't have time to read a full article, here's the gist of it: The royalty made the smart choice not to fight this one out.

If you've only got time for four paragraphs, read the following from the The Malaysian Insight article:

In the final analysis, this was a battle the Malay Rulers could not have won. Not against a PM with the law on his side and popular sentiment in his corner.

The royals played an out-sized role during the Najib Razak years because a weak and scandal-tainted PM ‎ceded space and authority to them during his days in office.

Mahathir 2.0 has too many things on his plate to worry about the Malay Rulers. He has a short runway to complete what is proving to be a gargantuan task of cleaning up Malaysia and finding new streams of economic reforms that bring prosperity to the masses.

The royals need not fear Dr Mahathir. They just must remember not to get in his way when he is exercising powers assigned to the PM by the Federal Constitution.