The problem is that for government power expansions/individual rights reductions, "Yes" can in fact be taken to mean "Yes forever, without ever revisiting the question". (The mechanism needn't be that there is literally no formal revisiting; it can be sufficient that weakening government power is politically untenable because whoever proposed it will be held accountable for every subsequent bad event that could hypothetically have been prevented with some unknown additional amount of government power.)
Stasis is not great, but surely preferable to an authoritarian ratchet.