Election Day is tomorrow. What happens after a blue wave? Poland may provide a preview.
Sen. Elissa Slotkin’s creepy and un-American screed in which she advocated for punishing young people for the crime of working for the Trump administration (“I want that deterrence message sent”) put Republicans on notice. Slotkin hinted she would like to seek prison sentences of up to 20 years for some Trump appointees.
The former (?) CIA officer has invoked Poland’s liberal Prime Minister Donald Tusk and his “iron broom” to “clean up” rightwing populism.
But just days before Americans go to the polls, Poland is undergoing a constitutional crisis.
Tusk — under the banner of “restoring the rule of law” — attempted to strengthen his grip over the country’s constitutional court.
Tusk’s 2023 election victory hinged on undoing the Law and Justice Party’s (PiS) changes, which emphasize patriotic sovereignty over European Union centralization. Promises made, promises kept: The PiS had resisted the EU’s changes to Poland’s high court. But a Tusk ally, Anna Korwin-Piotrowska, tried to forcibly unseat its PiS-aligned chief justice while President Karol Nawrocki, allied with the PiS party, was out of the country.
The hostile takeover got physical when Nawrocki returned and tried to enter the court building and was shoved back by Korwin-Piotrowska and a police cordon. He eventually got inside anyway. He held crisis talks at the presidential palace, but members of Tusk’s coalition reportedly didn’t show up.
Tusk has used the term “demokracja walcząca,” militant democracy, implying the ends of “saving democracy” justify any undemocratic means.
The parallels between the efforts to defang PiS in Warsaw and “Trump-proof” Washington are too obvious to miss: Tusk co-wrote a book with Trump critic, “authoritarianism expert” and globalist par excellence Anne Applebaum.
If Democrats win control of Congress and wield committee gavels, will they simply be fulfilling their checks-and-balances duty to oversee the Executive Branch?
Or is Slotkin’s invocation of Tusk’s “iron broom” a sign that some Democrats are engaged in the same winner-takes-all, take-no-prisoners battle to criminalize the MAGA movement and right-wing populism? And does it lead to the same chaos?
As Poland faces a constitutional crisis, French riots roll into their third week, and Brazilian opposition leaders leave the country, the Free World has become a tinderbox — and the left has shown that they’re eager to light it.