[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 75 (Thursday, June 15, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Page S5182]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              MAGNA CARTA

  Mr. BYRD. Mr. President, today is a very special anniversary. One 
will not find it noted on most calendars. Although it lacks the 
familiarity of the anniversary of the writing of the Constitution, for 
example, it is a day well worth remembering. The 15th day of this month 
deserves our attention for one very fundamental reason which is quite 
important to this Republic and to those of us in this Chamber. It marks 
the birth of the idea that ours is a government of laws and not of men, 
and that no man, no man is above the law.
  Seven hundred and eighty-five years ago, on June 15, 1215, English 
barons met on the plains of Runnymede, on the Thames River near Windsor 
Castle, to present a list of demands to their king. King John had 
recently engaged in a series of costly and disastrous military 
adventures against France. These operations had drained the royal 
treasury and forced King John to receive the barons' list of demands. 
These demands--known as the Articles of the Barons--were intended as a 
restatement of ancient baronial liberties, as a limitation on the 
king's power to raise funds, and as a reassertion of the principle of 
due process under law, at that time referred to in these words, ``law 
of the land.'' Under great pressure, King John accepted the barons' 
demands on June 15 and set his royal seal to their set of stipulations. 
Four days later, the king and barons agreed on a formal version of that 
document. It is that version that we know today as Magna Carta. 
Thirteen copies were made and distributed to every English county to be 
read to all freemen. Four of those copies survive today.
  Several of this ancient document's sixty-three clauses are of 
towering importance to our system of government. The thirty-ninth 
clause, evident in the U.S. Constitution's Fifth and Fourteenth 
amendments, underscores the vital importance of the rule of law and due 
process of law. It reads ``No freeman shall be captured or imprisoned . 
. . except by lawful judgment of his peers or by the law of the land.''
  Beginning with Henry III, the nine-year-old who succeeded King John 
in 1216, English kings reaffirmed Magna Carta many times, and in 1297 
under Edward I it became a fundamental part of English law in the 
confirmation of the charters. (An original of the 1297 edition is on 
indefinite loan from the Perot Foundation and is displayed in the 
rotunda of the National Archives.) In 1368, that would have been under 
the reign of Edward III, a statute of Edward III established the 
supremacy of Magna Carta by requiring that it ``be holden and kept in 
all Points; and if there be any Statute made to the contrary, it shall 
be holden for none.''
  In the early 1600s, the jurist and parliamentary leader Sir Edward 
Coke interpreted Magna Carta as an instrument of human liberty, and in 
doing so, made it a weapon in the parliamentary struggle against the 
gathering absolutism of the Stuart monarchy. As he proclaimed to 
Parliament in 1628, ``Magna Carta will have no sovereign.'' Unless 
Englishmen insist on their rights, another observed, ``then farewell 
Parliaments and farewell England.''
  By the end of that century, through the course of civil war and the 
Glorious Revolution, the rights of self-government, first acknowledged 
in 1215, became firmly secured.
  As settlers began their migration to England's colonies throughout 
the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, they took with them an 
understanding of their laws and liberties as Englishmen. Magna Carta 
inspired William Penn as he shaped Pennsylvania's charter of 
government. Members of the colonial Stamp Act Congress in 1765 
interpreted Magna Carta to secure the right to jury trials.
  After the colonies declared their independence of Great Britain, many 
of their new state constitutions carried bills of rights derived from 
the 1215 charter, Magna Carta. As University of Virginia law professor 
A.E. Dick Howard notes in his classic study of the subject, by the 
twentieth century, Magna Carta had become ``irrevocably embedded into 
the fabric of American constitutionalism, both by contributing specific 
concepts such as due process of law and by being the ultimate symbol of 
constitutional government under a rule of law.''

  In 1975, the British Parliament offered Congress and the American 
people a most generous gift. To celebrate two hundred years of American 
independence from Great Britain, Parliament offered to loan one of 
Magna Carta's four surviving copies to the United States Congress for a 
year. The document they selected is known as the Wymes copy and is 
regularly displayed in the British Library. Parliament also made a 
permanent gift of a magnificent display case bearing a gold replica of 
Magna Carta.
  A delegation of Senators and Representatives traveled to London in 
May 1976 to receive that document at a colorful and thronged ceremony 
in Westminster Hall. On June 3, 1976, a distinguished delegation of 
parliamentary officials joined their American counterparts for a gala 
ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda. The display case containing Magna 
Carta was placed near the Rotunda's center, where, over the following 
year, more than five million visitors had the rare opportunity to view 
this fundamental charter at close range.
  At a June 13, 1977, ceremony concluding the exhibit, I offered brief 
remarks in my capacity as Senate Majority Leader. I noted that nothing 
during the previous bicentennial year had meant more to the nation than 
this gift. I recalled the Lord Chancellor's diplomatic interpretation, 
during the 1976 ceremony, of the reasons for the bicentennial 
celebrations. This is what he said:

       What happened two hundred years ago, we learned, was not a 
     victory by the American colonies over Britain but rather a 
     joint victory for freedom by the English-speaking world.

  Today, the magnificent display case remains in the Capitol Rotunda as 
a reminder of our two nations' joint political heritage. I encourage my 
colleagues to visit this case in the rotunda and examine its panel with 
raised gold text duplicating that of Magna Carta. What better way could 
we choose to observe this very special anniversary day?

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