Mind-Numbing European Constitution At Heart Of Brexit Vote

Townhall.com ^ | July 13 | Bob Barr

[Kaslin]

Despite the shock and surprise with which many observers reacted to last month’s “Brexit” vote, the result of which begins the United Kingdom’s divorce from the European Union, the seeds of the breakup were long in the making – and entirely understandable. Notwithstanding efforts by some pro-EU proponents to paint the “Leave” camp as being filled with anti-immigrant racists, polls in the U.K. show that the primary motivation for “Leave” voters was concern over the loss of political, cultural, and economic identity that continued membership in the European Union was accelerating -- in a word, loss of sovereignty.

The document at the heart of the European Union’s structure is a multi-hundred page collection of mandates, regulations, and details that the 20^th-Century American cartoonist Rube Goldberg would have loved for the convoluted manner in which it seeks to control virtually every facet of political, cultural and economic activity in every part of every nation that signed it. This is the infamous “Treaty of Lisbon,” adopted as the effective Constitution of the EU in 2009. It is at the heart of the Brexit vote. It is a document that every true student and supporter of the Constitution of the United States knows represents the antithesis of individual liberty.

The U.S. Constitution is a short document that provides a framework for the governance of a people to meet changing circumstance and conditions while preserving fundamental liberty; it is unique and has lasted for two-and-a-quarter centuries for that very reason. The Treaty of Lisbon, just six-and-a-half years young, on the other hand, is a massive compendium of rules and edicts cobbled together by a committee of bureaucrats with the goal of prescribing how the individuals and their governing bodies must behave, and regardless of changing circumstances or individual choice.

Small wonder a majority of the voters in Britain – which nation’s formative charters included the Magna Carta that inspired our own Founding Fathers – never quite took to being told by a bunch of bureaucrats in Brussels that British laws, customs and culture were inferior to their collectivist mindset.

Those who drafted and voted on the U.S. Constitution understood that fundamental liberty is based on such universal and timeless principles as “due process” and “equal protection of the law” for all. Those and other fundamental, pre-existing rights were therefore guaranteed in the document as against government limitation. The drafters of the Treaty of Lisbon, clearly failing to understand that the best government is “limited government,” took the opposite approach; crafting a governing document that dictates, among hundreds of other requirements, that:

• Citizens must extend regard to the “welfare . . . of animals,” since animals are “sentinent beings”
• “Occupational hygiene” is to be fostered
• “Equal pay” is to be afforded for “equal work” of “equal value”
• It is desirable to make it “easier for the underrepresented sex [not defined] to pursue vocational activity . . . to compensate for disadvantage in professional careers”
• A “European Social Fund,” among other things, fosters and “facilitate[s] adaptation to industrial changes and to changes in production systems . . . through vocational training and retraining”
• Member states must “contribute to the promotion of European sporting issues . . . by protecting the physical and moral integrity of sportsmen and sportswomen, especially the youngest sportsmen and sportswomen”
• Members must “contribute to the flowering of the cultures of the Member States” and especially “the knowledge and dissemination of the culture and history of the European peoples”
• “Obviating sources of danger to the physical and mental health” is required

The massive bureaucracies the EU has maintained to implement, monitor, and enforce the thousands of mandates such as those few noted above, keeps tens of thousands of bureaucrats busy and well-paid through levies on the U.K. and the other 27 members of the Union.

The charge to these bureaucrats is mind-numbing. For example, in order to effectuate the “Social Policy” that is the core of the Treaty’s effort to communalize culture and politics across the Union, its regulators are authorized to: “[promote] employment, improved living and working conditions, so as to make possible their harmonization while the improvement is being maintained, proper social protection, dialogue between management and labour, the development of human resources with a view to lasting high employment and the combating of exclusion.” Gobbledygook taken to a new level.

[fhayek]

Any great document should be short, easy to read, and understandable by a normal person who works with his hands.

[spirited irish]

The ultimate goal of globalist ideology is reduction of human kind to impersonal, androgynous, aspects of the collective.

[Darteaus94025]

The Brits had, with just a few minutes of work, an opportunity to erase an entire level of unaccountable governmental bureaucrats, regulations and fees.

They chose well.

[867V309]

Any great document should be short, easy to read, and understandable by a normal person who works with his hands.

Something like this?

[Jack Hammer]

The EU was an abysmally bad idea from the get-go and must eventually break up if the European nations are to maintain any sort of viable identities.

[loveliberty2]

Thank you for posting!! This is such an important piece of information for Americans at this time in our own history.

Just recently someone posted a reminder that Bill Clinton stated in an interview on MTV in 1993:

"The purpose of government is to rein in the rights of the people" –- Bill Clinton

As we know, both the Clintons' view of the role of government, and of their own personal roles within that government, are not bound by what Thomas Jefferson called "the chains of the Constitution," as the Framers intended.

They, like the Lisbon document referred to here, and like the current Administration, set themselves above the Constitution, and would, if allowed to continue, return America to Old World ideas, turning the Founders' ideas upside down. Fortunately, Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of Independence and advocate of Creator-endowed individual liberty understood that the Constitution was to "rein in the . . ."government," not the people.

[Jacquerie]

Thank goodness we Americans aren’t subject to arbitrary rules from unaccountable bureaucrats.

[az_gila]

The EU was an abysmally bad idea from the get-go and must eventually break up if the European nations are to maintain any sort of viable identities

---

Like back to the “Common Market” which was what the UK actually voted on in 1975?

[fhayek]

Stephen Hawking couldn’t understand that!

[Impy]

It would be a lovely idea, if only there was no socialism, no liberalism, and no Islamism.

[olezip]

Where is God in their constitution?

[yefragetuwrabrumuy]

The difference between Old Europe and the UK and America is the difference between cultural systems with their roots in Roman Law-Napoleonic Law-French Civil Code, vs. those with their roots in Common Law.

The entire concept of government is radically different between the two. Old Europe is culturally oriented to feudalism, in which there are two classes, the nobility and the peasantry. The law is created and maintained by the nobility, and obeyed by the peasantry. There is no democracy, no liberty, no freedom that is inherent. Only that which is given by the lords and masters for as long as they like.

While the Democrats *adore* the Old European way of doing things, most Americans (and Brits, apparently) scorn and reject it entirely.

In Common Law, unless something is specifically *prohibited* in the law, it is legal. Make a better mousetrap.

In Civil Law, unless something is specifically *approved* by the government, it is inherently *illegal*. You have invented a new mousetrap. Were you *licensed* to invent a new mousetrap? If you have a mousetrap inventing license, have you sought approval for your new mousetrap by the bureaucracy? And in this case, is a new mousetrap *permitted* by the EU constitution, in its section outlining the laws pertaining to mousetraps?

If not then you have broken the law, and you cannot do anything with your mousetrap.

[Aut Pax Aut Bellum]

My wife, who is of Chinese birth, asked me today why America wants war with China. Huh? Apparently it is huge headlines in China.
I reminded her that Obama is all for global government, and resisted Brexit. He desires a one world government, that is what his handlers want.They are making noise to try and intimidate China.

[rlmorel]

I must have been one of the few (including those wishing to join the EU) who actually took a look at that abortion of a document years ago.

I didn’t read the thing cover to cover, but I actually looked at some of the ideas, and the politically correct stilted language.

Compare it to the US Constitution (as if we ever actually adhere to it anymore) and the difference in length, elegance, and power is stunning.

[rlmorel]

"...“Equal pay” is to be afforded for “equal work” of “equal value”..."

That giant gap in words and interpretation would be rivaled by the famous gap between Molly Pitcher's legs that admitted passage of that musket ball.