U.S. House Subcommittee on Europe, Energy, the Environment and Cyber

As representatives of the Polish American community, we feel obligated to express our disappointment with the way the leadership of the U.S. House Subcommittee on Europe, Energy, the Environment and Cyber, within the Foreign Affairs Committee, handled the hearing titled “Innovative Municipal Leadership in Central Europe: Founding Members of the Pact of Free Cities” that was held on December 2, 2021.

The United States has been the steadfast and welcomed leader of the free world and champion of democracy because its foreign policy was based on our shared values, not politics. Unfortunately, this traditional approach seems to be the thing of the past. There were several problems with hearing on December 2nd. The witness list was tendentious. It included four liberal mayors who all oppose their current conservative governments. The Subcommittee did not invite any witness that could provide a riposte from the perspective of current governments to the criticism voiced during the hearing.

The witness testimony was extremely one-sided. The four mayors raised a number of accusations against the current governments that the leadership of the committee accepted at face value without any attempt to verify how much of the testimony actually reflects reality. It looked like a partisan attempt to gain political sympathy from the leaders of the Democratic Party in the U.S.

The questions asked to witnesses were extremely leading. No impartial viewer would conclude that their intent was to provide the audience with a chance to see a balanced discussion about issues in Central Europe; but rather to drive a partisan message about who is on the correct side and who is not. Several loaded terms, such as “backsliding on democracy” and “authoritarian tendencies,” used throughout the hearing were presented as established fact, leaving the audience with a very distinct and clear idea of how to see what is going on in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia. In our opinion, what was presented was a subjective and maliciously wrong vision.

Consequently, we deplore that committee leaders who belong to the party that prides itself as champion of fairness, diversity and inclusion, ran a meeting that went against all of these ideas. There are over 10 million U.S citizens with Polish roots. Our community thrives with diversity of political views. However, we agree that fairness and balance are essential to working democracy. This hearing was unfair, lacked any diversity of thought and was extremely exclusive. We feel that it discriminated against those Polish Americans who support the government in Poland whose views were maliciously misrepresented, without any effort by the Subcommittee to provide balanced and fair discussion of the developments in the region.

So, when we think about “backsliding on democracy,” we believe it was exactly what the Subcommittee engaged in during the hearing. It was striking that the hearing virtually lacked any Republican participation. It would not be a surprise to us that the reason most Republican members of the committee did not take part is because they did not want to participate in a one-sided party hacking.

It is mind-boggling that the committee leaders from a party that for four years of Donald Trump’s presidency incessantly kept up the narrative about Russian interference in U.S elections would hold a hearing that cannot be seen as anything else but a malicious attempt to interfere in internal affairs of four Central European countries. We hope that in tradition of US foreign policy future hearings provide a more balanced view of the situation in the region.

Sincerely,

Leszek Pawlik

President
Coalition of Polish Americans