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| Europe |
| Terrible Mistake To Let The Peasants Read The Constitution Before Voting On It |
| 2005-06-15 |
| It was a crucial mistake to send out the entire constitution to every French voter, the architect of the EU's first constitution Valéry Giscard d'Estaing has said in an interview. In an interview with the New York Times, his first since the French rejection of the constitution two weeks ago, the former French president apportions most of the blame to president Jacques Chirac for failure in the referendum campaign. One crucial mistake was to send out the entire three-part, 448-article document to every French voter, said Mr Giscard. Over the phone he had warned Mr Chirac already in March: "I said, 'Don't do it, don't do it'". "It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text". Mr Giscard d'Estaing also puts the blame on the present generation of political leaders. Neither Mr Chirac nor other European leaders had a strategy for ratifying the constitution, he said. "The present generation of leaders, whatever their strengths, never put Europe at the top of their agenda". Mr Giscard d'Estaing was appointed by EU leaders at the Laeken summit in December 2001 to head a 102-member convention and draft a European Constitution. Today Mr Giscard believes the constitution probably would have passed in France if the EU leaders had not left open the possibility of full EU membership for Turkey. This week the bloc's leaders will meet in Brussels to decide the fate of the constitution, or "my document", as Mr Giscard puts it. The ratification process should continue across Europe, the former president advises and predicts: "In the end, it will pass", he added. "There is no better solution". |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #3 Yes, and they took one look and about threw up. The biggest problem is that it is Roman Law based, instead of Common Law based, like the US Constitution. In Roman Law, unless something is specifically authorized by law, it is forbidden. This means that their constitution was written to entail ALL laws, past, present and future. They had perhaps some idea that their constitution would become their statutes--an insane idea that makes their founding document full of nothing but trivial bureaucratic rules, while ignoring the broad, grand philosophical ideas. Now compare this to the US, where, if something is not specifically *forbidden* by law, then it is automatically legal. It severely limits what the government is *allowed* to do, not the people, and even that, it says it in broad terms. Then it *doubly* gets philosophical with the Bill of Rights, essentially saying, "Not only is the government forbidden from doing this, it is doubly forbidden, specifically forbidden, to infringe on these rights." And this is why the US Constitution is dynamite, and the EU Constitution is bureaucratic pablum. Intellectual strained beets. It all boils down to a simple question: Do the people rule the government, or does the government rule the people? |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2005-06-15 21:57 |
| #2 Open governement is a fine idea. I don't know that sending a hardcopy of the tome to every voter is the way to go. Is that what Chiraq really did? |
| Posted by: Super Hose 2005-06-15 21:10 |
| #1 When the guy who wrote your constitution says, "It is not possible for anyone to understand the full text", rest assured that you did the right thing by rejecting it. That the EUrocrats would try to foist off this incoherent monstrosity on the people in the first place is a measure of the disdain the ruling class holds towards those that pay there salaries. |
| Posted by: Scott R 2005-06-15 19:37 |