{"id":159528,"date":"2015-06-18T08:29:39","date_gmt":"2015-06-18T08:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=159528"},"modified":"2015-06-18T08:29:39","modified_gmt":"2015-06-18T08:29:39","slug":"king-john-butchered-authors-magna-carta","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/king-john-butchered-authors-magna-carta\/","title":{"rendered":"King John Butchered Authors of Magna Carta"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u2026 or at least he tried to butcher them. On this day 800 years ago, King John was compelled to sign Magna Charta, formally accepting a limit to his prerogative to ravage everything in England. But the ink on his signature was barely dry before he brought in foreign forces and tried to wipe out the barons who had compelled him to sign the Charta.\u00a0\u00a0The English almost lost their newly-recognized rights within months of the signing because they were not sufficiently suspicious of the King.\u00a0As David Hume noted in his magisterial<em> History of England<\/em>, \u201cThe ravenous and barbarous mercenaries, incited by a cruel and enraged prince, were let loose against the estates, tenants, manors, houses, parks of the barons, and spread devastation over the face of the kingdom. Nothing was to be seen but the flames of villages and castles reduced to ashes, the consternation and misery of the inhabitants, tortures exercised by the soldiery to make them reveal their concealed treasures\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Few people recall that\u00a0Pope Innocent speedily sought to annul\u00a0the\u00a0charter and formally absolved King John of any obligation to obey Magna Charta.\u00a0\u00a0English liberties received a boost from\u00a0the death of King John less than\u00a0a year after Runnymede.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The real lesson of Magna Charta is that solemn pledges do not make tyrants trustworthy.<\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0Similarly, American presidents are required to pledge upon taking office that \u201cI do solemnly swear that I will faithfully\u2026 preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.\u201d\u00a0At this point, that oath does little more than spur cheers from high school civics teachers. It has been more than 40 years since any president paid a serious price\u00a0for trampling the law. And <strong>presidents have a prerogative to trample constitutional rights as\u00a0long as they periodically\u00a0proclaim their devotion to democracy<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/feedproxy.google.com\/~r\/AWCBlog\/~3\/Zk0DyvhM4Gg\/\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u2026 or at least he tried to butcher them. On this day 800 years ago, King John was compelled to sign Magna Charta, formally accepting a limit to his prerogative to ravage everything in England. But the ink on his signature was barely dry before he brought in foreign forces and tried to wipe out [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":159564,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-159528","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159528","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=159528"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/159528\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/159564"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=159528"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=159528"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=159528"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}