Let the peasants decide? NEVER!

Smallest Minority has a piece on the attitudes of a lot of the bureaucrats and EU 'elites' towards the public voting on the EU constitution. Some very revealing comments, including:
"Referenda are in fact pure gambling. There is no guarantee of a positive outcome, unfortunately".
Got that? If you vote as they want, it's a 'positive' outcome, if you disagree it's a bad thing. Never mind that what the people decide is what's supposed to count, it's what the government thinks that's important.

A few years ago we had a measure shoved through in OK that flat infuriated the politicians and suckups. A petition was started calling for a special election, the measure in question stating that taxes could not be raised unless there was a vote by the people, or a supermajority in the House and Senate. You'd have thought it called for disembowelling a politician at every third full moon from the screaming. "We can't run the government this way! We can't take every tax increase to the people! This will make things fall apart!", etc. And the more signatures the petition got, the louder the screaming and the worse the predictions got. The measure passed, overwhelmingly, and what happened?

Nothing big. State government continued, with the change that the politicians couldn't raise taxes any time they felt like it; they had to either get a vote from the public, or get far more than a simple majority to do so. People showed they were willing to vote for an increase if convinced that it was necessary, but they had to be convinced. Some politician still has a fit on a regular basis, something along the lines of "because that Measure is in effect, we cannot do our jobs properly" because they can't simply raise taxes to pay for whatever.

What got me was the attitude that "since we were elected, we shouldn't have to ask the PEOPLE if we can do something". And it seemed to be worse with politicians who had been in for multiple terms. Sooner or later this tends to catch up to them, it just takes too long or doesn't happen often enough. A district in eastern OK had a U.S. Representative named Mike Synar years ago, who basically began ignoring what the folks back home thought and doing what the Democrat National Committee wanted. His last election he lost in the primary to a guy who's big expense was handing out cards that basically said "I'm NOT Mike Synar". And he lost big. And when he lost? He immediately moved permanently to D.C. Surprise, surprise.

Rambling a bit here, but the point stays that more and more politicians don't want the people to 'bother' them while they're at work. Never mind that they're supposed to be doing the people's business, and the people are SUPPOSED to have a say in it. It's a real problem here as well as in Europe, and we'd better stay on it. Or else.