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Zorro

(15,691 posts)
Mon Dec 2, 2019, 01:10 PM Dec 2019

King Charles I was executed by his parliament. There's a lesson there for Donald Trump

If, as the saying goes, “the past is prologue,” consider this:

On Jan. 30, 1649 (is that past enough?), Charles I, King of England, laid his head down on the executioner’s block and was put to death. The charge against him, after nearly a decade of civil war, was treason for making war on his own people. The jurors who convicted him were parliamentarians, and they found him guilty of pursuing his own interests rather than the interests of the country.

We should take more than passing note of this long ago event, not because anyone would advocate that our own leader should meet such a violent end, but rather because it helps explain a central conflict that continues to roil both British and American politics: the clash between the executive and legislative branches of government.

Drawing upon legal precedents such as the Magna Carta, Parliament in the early 17th century had been asserting its own authority more and more in the face of increasing demands of a monarchy that believed in its divine right to exclusive rule. Parliament had one significant weapon: the power of the purse. Under Charles I, Parliament exercised that authority by refusing to fund the king’s foreign policy as he wished, an act of defiance that provoked the king to dissolve Parliament and rule alone for 11 years. His opponents referred to that time as the “Eleven Years’ Tyranny.” Historians, striving to be more neutral, call it the Era of Personal Rule.

Later, when Parliament was reconvened and the conflict grew even more heated, Charles accused five members of the House of Commons of treason. Attended by armed guards, he entered Parliament to arrest them, but they had already left the chamber, and the speaker for the first time asserted his obedience to the House rather than to the king.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2019-12-02/opinion-what-do-donald-trump-boris-johnson-and-king-charles-i-have-in-common

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King Charles I was executed by his parliament. There's a lesson there for Donald Trump (Original Post) Zorro Dec 2019 OP
Kudos to the LA Times for publishing an opinion piece KPN Dec 2019 #1
Or we could just cut through the red tape Blue_Tires Dec 2019 #2

KPN

(15,587 posts)
1. Kudos to the LA Times for publishing an opinion piece
Mon Dec 2, 2019, 04:40 PM
Dec 2019

that needed to be said openly and publicly. Given the extent of Trump’s onslaught against and on our Constitution as well as our democratic system of governance, the use of armed force to contain and put down resistance is not hard in the least to imagine. In its context, that is war against his own people — war against we the people.

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