President Andrzej Duda signed the budget law himself. And then? And then he referred it to the Constitutional Court through the postal control procedure. What did it do? Nothing! The budget was signed and that was it. The rest doesn’t matter. The money will go to the people, nothing can stop this – said Donald Tusk, mocking the President of the Republic of Poland. In this way, Andrzej Duda, with his decision, gave Donald Tusk a free hand to launch an unlawful attack on the Constitutional Tribunal, with the aim of overthrowing the current Constitutional Tribunal and appointing a new Tribunal with a renewed composition – without judges. ambiguities mentioned by the former opposition and the current regime. Tomorrow, on Thursday, February 1, a resolution on the invalidity of the Constitutional Court in its current composition will most likely be adopted at a session of the Sejm, following the pattern shown by the attack on TVP. And then ‘strong people’ will enter to physically disperse the institution highest in the hierarchy of the legal system. The president had two options.
The first is not to sign the budget and, after submitting it to the Constitutional Court, wait for the ruling. According to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, the Tribunal would have two months to do this. If the Constitutional Court were to find the budget law unconstitutional, the government would have to present a new draft budget (already in line with the Constitution) and the whole procedure would start from the beginning. Because the President cited as justification for submitting the request to the Constitutional Court the unconstitutionality of the Polish Parliament, which is currently in operation and passing the Budget Law with an incomplete composition of 458 members (without MPs Kamiński and Wąsik), instead of If it concerns constitutional 460, there is a chance that the conformity of the adopted budget with the Constitution will not be recognized by the Constitutional Court; this would be almost 100 percent. What would this gain for the current opposition? Strengthening the position of the Constitutional Court, which is preparing to defend itself, and ultimately forcing the Sejm (in this case Marshal Szymon Hołownia) to allow two parliamentarians to return to the Sejm benches. If this is not the case, the situation becomes unsolvable because the legislator did not foresee such a sequence of events (illegal exclusion of two deputies from the meeting). Then the only solution would be to dissolve parliament and hold new elections, something to which I believe the December 13 coalition is not particularly prepared.
The second option the president faced was the one he chose. He signed the budget bill and then sent it to the Constitutional Court. In this way, with his signature, he approved a probably unconstitutional budget and gave the regime room for all maneuvers aimed at the liquidation of the Constitutional Court in its current composition. Nothing and no one can stop the government, which violates the law and the Constitution, from attacking the Constitutional Tribunal headed by Julia Przyłębska. This was best commented on by Donald Tusk, who responded derisively to the presidential maneuver.
What did Andrzej Duda gain from such a decision? I cannot answer this question. We can only watch as the last bastion of the rule of law, the Constitutional Court, will now fall. And finally, they will take over the office of the President of the Republic of Poland in order to overthrow or severely limit the power of the steadfast head of state, as he called himself.
Source: wPolityce