Excerpt:
Rep. Joe Fitzgibbon walked into the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday morning to sell his proposal to scrap the state's Cold War-era subversive activities law.
But with the recent terrorist attack on a satirical Parisian newspaper fresh in their minds, Republican lawmakers recommended keeping the law. Some even suggested updating and reactivating it as a 21st century version that included foreign Muslim terrorist organizations and the Occupy movement.
Drafted in the early years of the Cold War, the Subversive Activities Act made it a felony to be a member of a subversive group. It also required state workers or job applicants to take a loyalty oath stating that they weren't a Communist Party member. Despite being ruled unconstitutional in 1964 by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Subversive Activities Act has remained on the books.