Common Sense with Paul Jacob

On June 22, 1633, astronomer Galileo Galilei recanted his belief in heliocentrism, the idea that the Earth revolves around the sun. He didn’t do this based on scientific research, but under pressure from the Holy Office in Rome.

Three hundred forty-five years later, to the date, American astronomer James W. Christy discovered Charon (pictured above), a moon for what was then called “the ninth planet,” Pluto. This put Christy in an august company of satellite discoverers, including Galileo, who had discovered four of Jupiter’s moons in 1610.

When Pluto was later “demoted” to “dwarf planet” status, in 2006, no one was put under house arrest for objecting, or for not changing his or her mind, as had Galileo been centuries before.

The ratio in sizes between Charon and Pluto make the pair, effectively, a “double dwarf planet.”

On June 21, 1915, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an Oklahoma law denying the right to vote to some citizens. In Guinn v. United States, the Supreme Court found “grandfather clauses” in effect in several formerly slave states — though superficially race-neutral — to be little more than sneaky ways of allowing illiterate white folks to vote while disallowing illiterate black folks.

On the 20th of June in 1787, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Oliver Ellsworth moved to confine legislative powers to two distinct congressional bodies, and to strike the word “national” from the document. Edmund Randolph of Virginia had previously moved successfully to call the government the National Government of United States. Ellsworth moved that the government should continue to be called, simply, the United States of America.

The final wording eventually became “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.”

The words “nation” and “national” do not occur anywhere in the Constitution as ratified by the original set of states, or as amended.

John F. Kennedy authored the Encyclopædia Britannica’s article on Ellsworth. This was Kennedy’s only contribution to the encyclopedia.

The image, above, is of a portrait of Oliver Ellsworth by Ralph Earl (1785); it is housed, perhaps with a tinge of irony, in the National Portrait Gallery.