Posted on 06/17/2005 6:25:24 AM PDT by Alex Marko
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".
That, in itself, is the reason all of Europe should have rejected it. Can you imagine voting for something you didn't understand? Why, it would be as if you were the US Congress voting on the budget.
To me that in and of itself sounds like a pretty good reason to trash the damn thing.
This is precisely what happens over here all the time. Can anyone say Campaign Finance Reform? Pass a law on bullet points, hide the facts, and then let the courts enforce your draconian limitations on liberty. These Euro pols are quick students.
Soooo..is the frog saying his countrymen are too stupid to make the proper decision?
I think they have schools and universities there...don't they?
Or maybe the surrender monkeys really DID read the document and realized they didn't want anything to do with it?
We would have a lot less government regulation if our representatives looked at the legislation on which they vote. If each voter got copies we wouldn't have nearly as many truely bad laws.
Cripes, the US Constitution is four pages, plus one more for the Bill of Rights. Europe is creating a mess.
Just like our tax code, and we don't get to vote on that.
(Denny Crane: "Sometimes you can only look for answers from God and failing that... and Fox News".)
That alone is reason to kill it.............
Yeah, better the peons don't have a say in how they are governed, since the elite obviously know what's best for them.
Or perhaps they DID.
Full admission that he would prefer to LIE to the people, and IMPOSE the rule of select elitists upon the masses which he assumes were too stupid to understand that a 448 page "constitution" too complicated for anyone to understand was a recipe for disaster.
As long as they keep talking, and take further actions to force this on the people, it's hopeful that Europeons will wake up and vote out all of these elitist dictators and fix their countries properly, create a understandable constitution that works for the people, created by the people, not by greedy elitists who want to rule the world as they see fit.
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