Thursday
When Republican senators openly announced ahead of Donald Trump’s trial that they would be violating their jury oaths, they guaranteed the proceedings would be a sham. Only Mitt Romney took his oath seriously, earning the applause of (among others) Late Night’s Stephen Colbert. I mention Colbert because, in reflections on the significance of oaths, he quoted Man for All Seasons:
“You know, in my own small way I try to live my faith, and over the years, I’ve made a lot of fun of Mitt Romney,” Colbert said, recapping some of the punchlines. “And I mean this sincerely: After seeing that speech, I would do all those jokes again, because that’s the oath I took. But I do want to say, that was an inspiring speech. Because hearing Mitt Romney taking his oath to God seriously was like finding water in the desert.” He explained how “we know Republicans are lying when they say that Trump didn’t do anything wrong” and should remain in office, then how their votes to acquit condemn them: “Oaths may not mean a lot to some people. But here’s what it’s about: When you take an oath, you can’t think one thing and say another. You are asking God to witness, on the pain of your immortal soul, that what you whisper in your heart is what comes out of your mouth.”
At this point Colbert turned to Robert Bolt’s play. As Thomas More explains to his daughter, he can’t break his oath to the Catholic Church just because it will save his life:
When a man takes an oath, Meg, he’s holding his own self in his own hands. Like water. (He cups his hands) And if he opens his fingers then-he needn’t hope to find himself again. Some men aren’t capable of this, but I’d be loathe to think your father one of them.
Apparently no GOP senator outside of Romney was capable of this.
My friend Glenda Funk surfaced her own literary passage after witnessing Romney’s speech. In Arthur Miller’s Crucible, the fallible but ultimately heroic John Proctor tears up his confession because he too chooses the honor of his name over his life:
Because it is my name! Because I cannot have another in my life! Because I lie and sign myself to lies! Because I am not worth the dust on the feet of them that hang! How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul; leave me my name!
How will the other senators be remembered, especially given that Trump sees their vote to acquit as permission to keep violating the Constitution? Here I turn to the oath-breaking Dead Men of Dunharrow in Lord of the Rings, who are consigned to a world of perpetual twilight.
Aragorn explains that although, in days of old, these men swore an oath to join the fight against Sauron, they secretly consorted with him instead. Think of them as the equivalent of those who swear to uphold the Constitution while consorting with someone intent on tearing it down:
[A]t Erech there stands yet a black stone that was brought, it was said, from Númenor by Isildur; and it was set upon a hill, and upon it the King of the Mountains swore allegiance to him in the beginning of the realm of Gondor. But when Sauron returned and grew in might again, Isildur summoned the Men of the Mountains to fulfil their oath, and they would not: for they had worshipped Sauron in the Dark Years.
‘Then Isildur said to their king: “Thou shalt be the last king. And if the West prove mightier than thy Black Master, this curse I lay upon thee and thy folk: to rest never until your oath is fulfilled. For this war will last through years uncounted, and you shall be summoned once again ere the end.” And they fled before the wrath of Isildur, and did not dare to go forth to war on Sauron’s part; and they hid themselves in secret places in the mountains and had no dealings with other men, but slowly dwindled in the barren hills. And the terror of the Sleepless Dead lies about the Hill of Erech and all places where that people lingered.
No one has officially cursed our oath-breaking senators, but they have become all but shadow figures, either groveling before the president, remaining silent in the face of his outrages, or offering (like Sen. Susan Collins) milquetoast rebukes that are never backed up by action.
Can we imagine a scenario in which they leave the Trump cult and once again honor the oaths they swore? Will they emerge from the twilight state of endless denial, avoidance, equivocation and rationalization to stand once again for higher principles. In Lord of the Rings, the oath breakers prove decisive in breaking the siege of Gondor when they finally honor their oath:
The Dead awaken;
for the hour is come for the oathbreakers;
at the Stone of Erech they shall stand again
and hear there a horn in the hills ringing.
Whose shall the horn be? Who shall call them
from the prey twilight, the forgotten people?
The heir of him to whom the oath they swore.
From the North shall he come, need shall drive him:
he shall pass the Door to the Paths of the Dead.
Who knows, maybe GOP senators will hear the horn and once again rise up to defend the Constitutional separation of powers and the rule of law. My fear, however, is that they will cynically rediscover their love of those precious principles only if there is a Democratic administration.