Zkribbler said:
Well wait... Magna Carta Chapter 12 deals with taxes, Chapter 14 deals with representation, and the two chapters worked in tandem. Admittedly they don't specifically say "no taxation without representation," but the implication is there. At minimum, the foundation is laid.
I must be missing something in the Laws in Wales Acts of 1535. I see it setting out political reforms in Wales, but I see nothing about taxation.
And that's where it gets kinda weird, because Adams wasn't mining it for precedent about taxation, but about the constitutional structure of the empire.
His basic argument is that the Laws in Wales Acts establish that, by explicitly legislating to bring Wales into the "realm" of England and thus under direct parliamentary authority, where it had previously been an autonomous part of the Kingdom of England and thus under royal authority but not clearly under parliamentary authority, the king's dominions were assumed to be set apart from England proper unless explicitly provided for by legislation. As the colonies had been founded by royally-sanctioned charters of various kinds, but never explicitly incorporated into England proper, they rwere part of the Kingdom but not realm of England, so parliament had no right to legislate over the colonies directly, but at most to mediate between the colonies and other sovereign powers. The Welsh precedent was important, because unlike Ireland, Hanover or (historically) Scotland, the colonies had never been independent entities in their own right, they existed in this strange position of being England but not-England, and the precedent of Wales, along with the English palatinates of Chesire, Lancashire and Durham, provided the only working examples in English constitutional history.
But, yeah, there's probably a reason why people globbed onto DontOppressMeBro.doc more readily than Tudor-era constitutional technicalities.
Dachs said:
man what's wrong with Robert Treat Paine
A
real patriot bullies his son into becoming president even when the son doesn't want to be president, and a
real real patriot bullies his son into becoming president even winning carries the genuine risk of being shot in the face by Andrew Jackson.
