Stephen Mitchell

Poland’s constitutional crisis is now a proxy fight between Washington and Brussels. It got violent on Friday. Liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk, backed by the EU, is trying to take control of the Constitutional Tribunal. The court is still led by holdover conservatives and is backed by President Karol Nawrocki, a Trump ally. A conservative president and court in Poland serve U.S. interests. The EU is supporting the effort to remove that leadership. That’s another reason U.S. taxpayers shouldn’t keep funding NATO and the UN when those bodies back governments working against American interests. On Friday a liberal-aligned judge in Poland, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, ordered a one-month suspension of the Polish Constitutional Tribunal’s holdover president, Bogdan Święczkowski. Korwin-Piotrowska claims this authority as the longest-serving judge under a temporary-suspension provision. Yet her own status is disputed. She was elected by the current pro-EU parliamentary majority, but Nawrocki has refused to swear her in. The existing Tribunal leadership rejects her as a legitimate judge and called the move to remove their president a coup. The court does not accept the suspension she declared. Police were deployed to the court building amid protests by PiS (Law and Justice) supporters. The holdover side, the conservative judges on the Constitutional Tribunal, is calling the whole thing a coup. The 15-member court still has a conservative majority among the judges the holdover leadership recognizes, but Tusk’s parliamentary majority has elected eight new judges this year. Nawrocki has refused to swear in five of them, so the two sides disagree on who even counts as a sitting judge. The Constitutional Tribunal is Poland’s highest court on constitutional questions. It can strike down laws and has the final say on whether government actions are valid. Control of the court means control over what the constitution means in practice. Unlike U.S. Supreme Court justices, Polish Constitutional Tribunal judges are not appointed for life. They serve single 9-year terms and cannot be re-elected. That fixed term makes the court easier to politicize. Nawrocki has blocked replacements because he does not want the court to become entirely liberal. Tusk’s government wants to replace the conservative-era judges with its own. The logic is the same one Democrats use when they talk about packing the U.S. Supreme Court—adding justices to put the court under political control. Nawrocki was on a plane to Senegal and turned it around mid-flight after the suspension and police presence. He reportedly arrived back at the presidential palace in Warsaw. The EU has long treated the existing Constitutional Tribunal as illegitimate and favored Tusk’s side. Trump has treated Nawrocki as an ally. Both are now watching the same fight. What we’re seeing in Poland is not a normal democratic process. Liberals are using a disputed judge to try to remove the country’s highest court’s conservative president. We’ve seen similar abuses of power by liberal judges recently in Brazil’s election and in the U.S. with lawfare. In Poland, when the court resisted the illegal removal of its president, police showed up. That’s the pattern when liberals do not get their way through normal institutions. It’s another reason they should not be trusted with power.