She became a center of attraction once more after she managed to receive Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan on her TV show this week. Erdoğan has been her only political guest so far. With this experience, Hülya Avşar can no doubt go on hosting other politicians and dignitaries on her show.  

When you agree to appear on a TV show you also agree to endure most any kind of treatment. Her show with Prime Minister Erdoğan revolved around questions pertaining to conceptions or misconceptions about him and his party. She asked if he was in favor of a “Shariah state” for example, or forcing women to cover their heads. She also inquired about the root of fears about the Justice and Development Party (AK Party) policies. She also, at one point, directed an intimate question at Prime Minister Erdoğan regarding his son's wife, whether he would let her uncover her head if she so desired.

As far as I gathered from the press coverage afterward, the prime minister passed the test on secularism with flying colors, although some journalists didn't find Avşar persistent enough. Looking at her direct questions and follow-ups, I see no uncovered areas worth covering.

The only objection I have is this anachronism: The questions asked by Avşar are all pertinent to a period before the AK Party's ascendance to power. The AK Party has been running the country for more than five years now, and the person who is its driving force in almost all those five years has proven himself to be a real democrat, a statesman respectful of the existing constitutional set-up of his country. The questions about Shariah and Erdoğan's stance on secularism have been answered by him hundreds of times previously.

I don't criticize Avşar for her tardiness -- no, far from it -- she has asked the questions that re-emerged in the public mind after the party closure case was opened by the Constitutional Court and the recent verdict on headscarf issue by the same body. Some people don't take deeds into account, but words, and not the words uttered by the prime minister himself, but by his opponents.

We are back to square one, as if the AK Party hadn't single-handedly governed the country for five years and as if Erdoğan is still suspected of having a hidden agenda.

This is most annoying. The government has done nothing to deserve this harsh treatment at the hands of judiciary. Almost all the evidence submitted by the chief prosecutor in his indictment is either unproven accusation and false news or the utterances of minor politicians.

The country and its constitutional setup haven't changed a bit during the AK Party rule.

The AK Party and Erdoğan don't deserve to be treated as if they present a real threat to republican principles, but its opponents for their part represent a clear and present danger for the democratic system.

We now know how the Constitutional Court justices have come to their decisions on the headscarf issue. According to reliable sources from the Constitutional Court speaking to Doğan Media Group papers (Hürriyet and Vatan), the justices asked three questions in their deliberations: 1. What if a party that has reached the maximum majority in Parliament tries to change the Constitution all by itself? 2. How is it possible to stop that party from overhauling the Constitution? 3. What if the same party announces that it will hold elections in 20 years?

All these questions are based on false premises and the result -- what the Constitutional Court did after deliberations, which lasted no more than six hours -- is stretching its constitutional mandate into unacceptable limits in any given democracy. The 1982 Constitution gives the Constitutional Court only a mandate of supervising the laws enacted by Parliament. The court doesn't have a mandate over constitutional changes. In its latest verdict, the Constitutional Court decided to take up the essence of the issue by overstretching its constitutional mandate.

On the one hand, the government has done nothing that can be portrayed as attempting to change the constitutional framework of the secular state, but the same government and its leaders are charged with exactly what they haven't done; while on the other hand, the Constitutional Court has adopted a new mandate with little regard to the rule of law as depicted in the Constitution itself.

Some consider the AK Party to be presenting a danger to the secular set-up of the country, although it hasn't done any harm to it over the last five years, but they don't look at the clear and present danger to the constitutional framework emanating from the latest decision by the Constitutional Court.

I can hardly wait for Hülya Avşar to invite either the president of the Constitutional Court or the chief prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Appeals to her TV show.