TWO KINGS

Yesterday was January 20, 2025.

Because it was the third Monday in January, it was a national holiday set aside to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. Jr. Because of the Twentieth Amendment to the Constitution, it was also the day the President of the United States takes office. Because of a whole host of factors that cumulatively give notice to the potential for perversion overtaking our politics in this first quarter of the twenty-first century, it was also the day that Donald Trump became America's 47th President.

The contrast between Dr. King and Donald Trump could not be greater. 

King preached non-violence in the service of justice and optimistically held that, while "the arc of the moral universe is long," it "bends toward justice." When he delivered his famous "I Have A Dream" speech before the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, however, he was much more  focused on "the fierce urgency of now" than on that arc. 

"This is not the time," King said, "to engage in the luxury of cooling off or the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."  In fact, he argued, it was time for the exact opposite, warning America that it would "be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment", that the country would "have a rude awakening" if it "return[ed] to business as usual."

He did not base his predicted "awakening" on fact-free rhetoric.

Nor was his eloquence spun out of  dystopian fiction.

For the hundred years that had passed since Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, King explained, the nation had "defaulted" on the "promissory note to which every American was . . . heir." That "note was a promise that all men . . . would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."  

"Instead of honoring that sacred obligation," however, "America ha[d] given the Negro people a bad check, a check that ha[d] come back marked 'insufficient funds.'"

This would not do.

"We refuse to believe the bank of justice is bankrupt," he asserted. "We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation."

So, he concluded . . .

"We have come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and security of justice."

Most of us remember Dr. King's speech because of what followed. 

His dream  . . .

Laid out in five stanzas.

It was a dream . . .

Where America "will . . . live out the true meaning of its creed . . . that all men are created equal'";

Where Georgia's former slaves and former slave owners will "sit down at the table of brotherhood";

Where Mississippi's "heat of oppression" will be "transform[ed] into an oasis of freedom and justice";

Where "one day", even "in Alabama with its vicious racists", black and white children will be able to join hands "as sisters and brothers"; and

Where his "children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."

Lots of Americans think King's dream has been fulfilled.

Americans of color, however, know it has not.

They earn less, get sicker, die sooner and are arrested more often than their white countrymen.  They pay more for their houses, their food, their cars and their clothes.  They do not get to fail up. Their history is either denied or suppressed. And, worst of all, remedies are now deemed racist so they can then be rescinded.

The check has not yet cleared.

Perhaps the best evidence of how far we have not come was also on display yesterday in the Inauguration of Donald Trump as America's 47th President.

One of the un-sung (and often un-noticed) portions of Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech is the message he delivered to his fellow sufferers:

"There is something I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads to the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force."

Whatever else can be said of Donald Trump, it is certainly the case that he could have never credibly uttered those words.  

For the entire nine years of his political career, bitterness and hatred have been his closest allies. He lives in their world, forever using the former to stoke the latter and vice versa. Far from rejecting violence as a means to any political end, he has advocated it. 

In his campaigns he has more than once encouraged supporters to beat up their opponents and on January 6, 2021, he incited a riot designed to overthrow the 2020 election he lost (and to this day has refused to concede)  and then stood by silently and refused to call off the violence.  The Capitol was ransacked.  The electoral vote count was stopped.

Five people died.

Yesterday, he pardoned or commuted the sentences of more than 1,600 J6 convicts, including those who had violently attacked the police and others who were serving decades long  sentences for seditious conspiracy on account of their efforts to effectively orchestrate a violent coup and keep him in the White House.

Earlier in the day, he had issued a firehose of executive orders, one of which declared a national emergency at the southern border. Another cancelled the appointments of over 27,000 whose asylum hearings had been scheduled. A third purports to end birthright citizenship.

The last of these directives is almost certainly unconstitutional.  The 14th Amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, no executive order can eliminate it, and today eight states and the District of Columbia sued to stop the Trump Administration from denying it. In explaining their lawsuit, New Jersey's attorney general noted that presidents, though powerful, are not kings. 

As to asylum, Trump cannot end it but he can (and now has) complicate it. The app through which the Biden Administration had allowed asylum hearings to be scheduled has been shut down and 27,000 whose appointments through it were cancelled must now find a new way.  As for the newly declared southern border emergency, it does not exist. In fact, illegal crossings there are at a four-year low. Of course, eliminating the CBP One app may increase illegal crossings and thus create the not-yet-existing emergency Trump's order (falsely) asserts to be upon us.

Everyone knows Trump is a pathological liar and yesterday was no different. 

Fact checkers had a field day with his twenty-nine minute Inaugural Address and follow-on extemporaneous comments throughout the day. 

He repeated all his standard lies -- the ones about Biden having indicted him (Biden didn't), foreigners paying tariffs (they don't), the border being overrun by illegals released from mental institutions (not happening), 571 miles of newly built border wall in his first administration (off by over 100, even counting repairs to existing walls), Nancy Pelosi rejecting his offer of  National Guard troops on January 6 (didn't happen), the House's J6 select committee destroying evidence (it didn't), and the 2020 election being "rigged" (it wasn't).

He even added some new ones -- claiming "record inflation" during the Biden Administration (nope, the record -- 23.7% -- was set on Trump's own watch in 2020); asserting his opponents tried to rig the election he just won (I guess to overcome the narrowness of his win, a sort of reprise of his claims in 2016 that he would have won the popular vote against Hillary if illegals had not cast ballots); and charging that China runs the Panama Canal (it doesn't, but Trump wants it "back" and appears ready to take it back, by force if necessary).

So that was our yesterday.

One King had a dream.

The other returned as a nightmare.

AND YET IT MOVES

In 1616, the Catholic Church decided that heliocentrism -- the Copernican view that the Earth revolved around the Sun and was not the center of the Universe -- was heresy. The decision was made by the Roman Inquisition, the Church's set of formal tribunals set up in the wake of the Protestant Reformation to enforce it teachings and punish those who denied them. 

By the time the Church made its decision in 1616, heliocentrism as a reasonable hypothesis had been around for a hundred years and fairly conclusive proof either for it or against pure geocentricity had existed for at least six. That proof came in the form of observations of the full phases of  Venus and of the moons orbiting Jupiter, both which Galileo made with his telescope in 1609 and published in 1610. Under the Ptolemaic or geocentric theory, only two Venetian phases could have been observed given the fixed place of Earth and the orbit of the Sun and Venus around it; and under that theory no moons could have orbited Jupiter (because all planets and their moons orbited Earth). 

Once Galileo made his observations, the gig was up. 

Though pure heliocentrism would only become irrefutable two hundred years later with observation of its required stellar parallax, pure geocentricity was dead.

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this created a problem for the hierarchs in the Catholic Church. 

For much of the prior century the Church had been at (un)holy war with the Protestant Reformation on the issue of who got to say what the Bible actually meant. The Pope and his Cardinals were not remotely willing to give up the Church's -- in other words, their --  claimed right to being the  final arbiter of the matter. That said, however, from the point at which Copernicus first offered heliocentrism as a hypothesis in 1514 until the point at which the Inquisition condemned the view as heretical in 1616, the Church had been more or less ambivalent on the issue. Throughout much of the sixteenth century, it acknowledged heliocentrism as a hypothesis and watched it compete (unsuccessfully) with both the governing Ptolemaic paradigm and Tycho Brahe's geocentric alternative allowing other planets to revolve around the Sun even as the Earth remained immovable.

That all changed, however, in 1616.

When . . .

Politics got in the way of truth.

The conventional wisdom is that Biblical inerrancy killed heliocentrism and was the reason Galileo was banned from teaching or defending the doctrine in 1616 and then ultimately put under house arrest in 1633 for having violated the ban. At least a half dozen statements in the Psalms and Old Testament said the earth was immovable and in another, Moses' second in command, Joshua, makes the moving Sun stand still. 

All of this, however, was also true throughout the sixteenth century when the Church was tolerating Copernicus and his followers. 

What changed is that, in addition to reporting his observations of the Venetian phases and Jupiter's moons, Galileo weighed in on the authority and meaning of the Bible itself. In a famous letter to a friend in December 1613, he argued that the Bible's authority extended only to matters of faith; that science had to have the last word on whether the Earth moved or the Sun stood still; and that even if one cited the Bible on the issue, parts of its narrative were more consistent with Copernicus than Ptolemy. 

Today, none of this is controversial, either in or outside the Catholic Church.

Back then, however, all of it was -- as we lawyers would say -- a bad move.

Kind of like telling a judge he is full of it.

Even if he (or she) is, you are going to lose.

And so . . .

Galileo did.

On February 19, 1616, the Inquisition issued a unanimous report holding heliocentrism "foolish and absurd in philosophy and formally heretical since it explicitly contradicts in many places the sense of the Holy Scripture". The next day it ordered Galileo to "abstain completely from teaching or defending the doctrine or from discussing it" and seventeen years later, after he wrote and published his Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, the Inquisition tried him again.  This second time, it found him "vehemently suspect of heresy", required him to "abjure, curse and detest" heliocentrism and sentenced him to house arrest. Publication of any of his existing or future work was forbidden. 

In 1642, still under house arrest, he died.

In many respects, Galileo's second trial was an utter farce. 

He wrote Dialogue after a new Pope (Urban VIII) asked him to lay out the cases for and against heliocentrism without taking a position advocating the doctrine but specifically including the Pope's own views against it. This he did, and in 1632 the book was published with both papal permission and the Inquisition's authorization. Six months later, however, the Pope banned the book and sent it to the Inquisition for examination, apparently having become enraged in the interim that his position had been conveyed through the mouth of the dialogue's Aristotelian (whom Galileo had named Simplicio, which in the vernacular Italian of the time was understood to mean "simpleton", and whose geocentric claims were systematically refuted by the dialogue's impartial Copernican proponent).

Back then, of course, hell hath no fury . . .

Like a Pope insulted.

Following his second trial, and either immediately after he had complied with the ordered abjuration or after he was transferred to house arrest at his own home, Galileo reportedly looked at the sky and then at the ground.

He then muttered . . . 

"E pur si muove."

"And yet it moves." 

It was the truth that set him -- and later, us -- free, the one no insulted pope or false decree could ignore . . .

Or change.

There is no contemporary record that Galileo made this statement.  It was mentioned for the first time in print in 1757 and was also part of a painting that may (or may not) have been created in the mid-1640s shortly after Galileo's death.

Those who dispute the authenticity of the remark note that it would not have been in Galileo's interest to make it.

Which is true.

But it is also true that, throughout his life, Galileo was not particularly circumspect when it came to commenting on the Church hierarchy's unscientific nonsense.

A long time ago, I was interviewed by a federal prosecutor in a case where a colleague (who later pled guilty) was accused of overbilling the government.  I had had my own run-ins with this guy, am not subtle,  and, to put it mildly, did not think highly of him. In any case, during the interview, the prosecutor asked if I had once said this would-be defendant was going to "wind up in jail" given his dishonesty. At the time, I had no recollection of saying this and said so to the prosecutor. I also told him, however, that I was not saying those who reported this statement to him were wrong.

Because . . .

As I put it . . .

It certainly sounded like something I would have said.

That's where I am with "And yet it moves".

It sure sounds like something Galileo would have said.

Yesterday was January 6, 2025.  

Four years ago to that day, Donald Trump unleashed a violent mob on lawmakers assembled on Capitol Hill to certify Trump's loss of the presidency to Joe Biden. 

Since then, Trump has regularly injected the lie that he won the 2020 election into the political veins of the American electorate, derided and condemned any effort by the courts or Congress to hold him accountable for having attempted to orchestrate a coup, and treated violent and disgusting J6 insurrectionists as political prisoners and hostages he intends to free.

Since then, two American institutions -- the United States Senate and the Supreme Court -- have failed miserably in the performance of their specific Constitutional duties, the first in failing to muster the courage needed to have sixty-seven of its members find Trump guilty of the obvious high crime and misdemeanor that January 6 was and the second in refusing to remove him from the 2024 presidential ballot given the 14th Amendment's blanket ban on insurrectionists holding any civil or military office.

Since then, Trump has also fully turned the Republican Party and its supporters into an army of fellow-travelers and deniers who affirm and rubber stamp his lies, ignore his immorality and dishonesty, and pretend chaos  is a substitute for competence.

And since then he has been (narrowly) elected the 47th president of the United States.

There is another America out there.

Amidst the wreckage that is today and may be the next four years, it is an America true to its "better angels" and best self. Perhaps faintly (these days) but still unmistakably, you can see that America if you look.  It is there in the decency of Jimmy Carter, the courage of Liz Cheney, the determination of Juan Merchan, the grace of Kamala Harris, the competence of Joe Biden and the humanity of Archbishop Robert McElroy. It is also there in the 215 House Democrats, 45 Senate Democrats and two Independents who certified the November presidential election.

Honorably doing yesterday . . .

What 147 Republicans, a soon to be ex-president and thousands of his deranged supporters . . .

Could not do four years ago.

E pur si muove.