Taking it back to the Magna Carta!
Have you heard the latest from New Hampshire? No, not the primary they'll be having there next week. This time it is the state legislature that is making news. A state legislature, like so many this year, dominated by Republicans.
It seems that three Republican members of the legislature are proposing a law that would require that any new bill proposed in New Hampshire cite a passage from the Magna Carta as its basis and reason for being.
The Magna Carta, as you will no doubt recall from your history lessons, was a charter forced upon King John of England by feudal barons in the year 1215! Yes, as I've long suspected, the Republicans don't just want to repeal the twentieth century and the modern era; they want to take us all the way back to medieval times. To quote from Wikipedia's information about the Magna Carta:
The 1215 Charter required King John of England to proclaim certain liberties, and accept that his will was not arbitrary, for example by explicitly accepting that no "freeman" (in the sense of non-serf) could be punished except through the law of the land, a right which is still in existence today.
...
Despite its recognised importance, by the second half of the 19th century nearly all of its clauses had been repealed in their original form.
So even in England, its place of origin, most of the charter was deemed to have outlived its usefulness by the "second half of the 19th century."
Yeah, that sounds like something that will fit right in with the Republican platform in 2012.
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