In October, the European Court of Justice ordered Poland to suspend changes made to the nation’s constitution that drove many judges into retirement, and then enabled the ruling Law and Justice Party (PiS) to select their replacements. On Wednesday of this week, the Polish parliament bent the knee to the European Union (EU) and modified the law, enabling the more than 20 judges of the Polish Supreme Court who had been forced into retirement to return to work.
The number of judges who had been retired amounted to about one-third of the total of the Court.
Justice Minister Zbigniew Ziobro told Parliament, “We are fulfilling our obligations.” Although he added defiant rhetoric, saying, “At the same time, we are pushing forwards with our changes in the justice system,” the fact remains that a supposedly sovereign nation — Poland — buckled to the dictates of the EU.
This raises the question of whether Poland, or for that matter, any other nation within the EU, is truly a sovereign and independent nation. After all, if a nation cannot restructure its own government without permission from another political entity, in this case the EU, is it really a nation at all?
One could certainly argue that the actions of the Polish government in this instance are a violation of principles that Americans value, such as separation of powers. Be that as it may, where does this stop? Is that not Poland’s business?
In 1936, President Franklin Roosevelt won reelection in a massive landslide, carrying 46 of 48 states (Alaska and Hawaii were not admitted as states until 1959). Angry that the Supreme Court had frustrated much of his New Deal laws as unconstitutional, such as in the Schecter v. United States decision of 1935 that struck down the National Recovery Administration as unconstitutional, Roosevelt proposed a scheme in 1937 to increase the number of justices on the Supreme Court.
Roosevelt’s “court-packing” plan would have added six more judges, bringing the total to 15. He argued that six members were over 70 years of age and they supposedly needed the help of some new judges. Everyone understood the actual purpose was to remove the Supreme Court as an impediment to his New Deal programs. Even the overwhelmingly Democratic Senate turned down the plan by a vote of 70-20, contending that FDR’s plan would have upset the balance of power in the U.S. government under “separation of powers.”
While often cited as an example of a president seeking to expand his powers at the expense of the judicial branch, had the proposal passed, what would have been the reaction of the United States had a foreign power, or any combination of powers, denounced the law, and ordered the United States to repeal it?
That would have been unthinkable, of course. At that time, hardly anyone would have publicly argued that the internal affairs of one nation are the business of other nations.
Yet, this is the situation we have today. This is a powerful example of why the people of Great Britain voted to leave the increasingly authoritarian European Union. The modern EU evolved from a simple six-nation trade agreement on coal and iron. Today, it increasingly dictates the internal matters of member nations. This is what then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned about when she urged that the United Kingdom reject the Maastricht Treaty (which basically created the EU) some years ago. Instead of heeding her wise warnings, her own Conservative Party ousted her from power, powerfully demonstrating the clout of the globalists pushing for the present EU.
As America considers its own trade alliances, such as the recent NAFTA update negotiated by the Trump administration, this episode across the pond should provide our country a warning. Multilateral trade deals are about much more than commerce. What type of judicial system a country opts to use has nothing to do with international trade, yet the EU has no respect for one of its member nation’s sovereignty.
With the example of Poland and the EU, we can see that nothing is really considered a local matter by today’s globalists in Europe and elsewhere. What they want is a world government, ruled by unelected and faceless bureaucrats, and the globalists that pick them.
In 1776, 13 colonies of the British Empire chose to secede from that empire because they did not like being told what to do on local matters by a far-off and distant government in London. The lesson for Americans today is that we need to extricate ourselves from these multilateral managed trade deals, and we need to get out of multinational organizations such as the United Nations.
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