Good morning, it’s Monday.
Today we celebrate the birthday of civil rights legend Martin Luther King Jr., even though he was actually born on Jan. 15, 1969, (which was a Tuesday). The holiday is observed annually on the third Monday of January, which generally falls anywhere from the 15th to the 21st.
This holiday, which was established by a vote of Congress (not unanimous in either chamber, more on that in a moment) in 1983, and first observed on Jan. 20, 1986.
It works the same way as holidays that fall under the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act – Washington’s Birthday (AKA President’s Day), Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Columbus Day – designed to increase the number of three-day weekends for federal employees – something on which the travel industry is (understandably) very keen.
As MLK Day was created after the Act, it does not officially fall under its umbrella.
Veterans Day on initially on the “always-on-Monday” holiday list, but then was moved back to its traditional date of Nov. 11 – the actual date that WW II ended – by act of Congress in 1975, that became effective in 1978.
When Veterans Day (also known as Armistice Day in some counties) falls on a Saturday or Sunday, it’s often observed on Monday. And if it’s in the middle of the week, workers get a floating holiday, if they choose.
This is all a little confusing, I know. Sorry for the tangent. I just find the politics of holidays so ….oddly interesting.
So back to MLK.
A push for a holiday in his honor began not long after he was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. James Earl Ray, a fugitive from the Missouri State Penitentiary, pleaded guilty to murdering King, but later recanted his confession.
Things got very complicated from there, with allegations of conspiracy that involved the Mafia, local, state and federal government agencies, and a restauranteur named Lloyd Jowers. The King family believed Ray was set up to take the blame for MLK’s death.
In August 1998, then US Attorney Janet Reno ordered another investigation into the assassination, and the Justice Department two years later issued a 150-page report rejecting the conspiracy allegations. King’s family was not satisfied with this outcome, issuing a statement that read in part: “We do not believe that, in such a politically sensitive matter, the government is capable of investigating itself.”
As for the holiday, there was controversy involved there, too. Labor unions pushed the idea hard, and Rep. John Conyers and Sen. Edward Brooke, a Michigan Democrat and Massachusetts Republican, respectively, introduced a bill to make King’s birthday a national holiday. A vote did not occur in the House until 1979, and at the time, and it did not pass, missing the mark by five votes.
Among arguments floated by opponents: Another three-day holiday would be too expensive, and King was a private citizen, which bucked tradition. (Though, technically speaking, so was Christopher Columbus). Sen. Jesse Helms even questioned whether King was important enough to merit a holiday in his honor.
Here’s a nice New York aside: Helms filibustered the bill to create MLK Day in 1983, and submitted a 300-page document filled with FBI reports that asserted King has consorted with communists. The Empire State’s own Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan reportedly called the report “a packet of filth” before throwing it on the Senate floor and stomping on it.
President Ronald Reagan was originally opposed to MLK Day, citing concerns about cost. Asked to comment on Helms’ claims regarding King being a communist, Reagan reportedly replied: “We’ll know in 35 years, won’t we?” (This refers to the eventual release of sealed FBI tapes, which are in the National Archives and scheduled for release in 2027).
Reagan did eventually sign the bill creating MLK Day into law in November 1983. The legislation also created the Martin Luther King Jr. Federal Holiday Commission to oversee observance of the holiday, and President George H.W. Bush made King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, a lifelong member. (She died in January 2006).
Not surprisingly, not every state was quick to adopt and observe MLK Day. New Hampshire was the last state to do so in 1999. (Before that, they had “Civil Rights Day”). But the “honor” of being the final state in the union to offer MLK Day as a paid holiday to workers goes to South Carolina, which didn’t do so until 2000. Before then, employees could choose to either observe MLK Day or one of three Confederate holidays.
It’s nice to have an extra day off, of course, but hopefully you’ll take some time today to think about Dr. King’s legacy and all the work that he did in the battle for racial equity – not to mention how far we have yet to go to achieve that goal. It is traditional to do acts of service in King’s memory today…in case you’re feeling inspired.
We’ll see mostly sunny skies today, with a few clouds in the afternoon and temperatures in the mid-30s.
In the headlines…
President Joe Biden made a historical pilgrimage yesterday to “America’s freedom church” to mark MLK Jr.’s birthday, saying democracy was at a perilous moment and that his life and legacy “show us the way and we should pay attention.”
Biden marked what would have been MLK Jr.’s 94th birthday with a sermon at the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, celebrating the legacy of the civil rights leader while speaking about the urgent need to protect US democracy.
“Are we a people who choose democracy over autocracy? You couldn’t ask that question 15 years ago, right? You would’ve thought democracy was settled – not for African Americans, but democracy as an institutional structure was settled. But it’s not,” he said.
None of the sweeping voting rights measures Biden championed last MLK Day passed the Democratic-controlled Congress last year, and the prospects of any passing a newly elected Republican-controlled House seem vanishingly small.
A third batch of classified documents was found at Biden’s residence in Wilmington, Delaware, the president’s attorneys announced.
Republican lawmakers continued to voice outrage over recent discoveries of classified documents at Biden’s home and former offices.
California Democrat Rep. Adam Schiff is not ruling out the possibility that national security may have been jeopardized by Biden’s mishandling of classified documents.
A number of prominent Democrats voiced their support over the weekend for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden’s handling of classified documents.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer, in a letter to White House chief of staff Ron Klain, asked for the release of visitors logs from Biden’s Delaware home.
Comer said that the House Oversight and Accountability Committee will not investigate former President Trump over his handling of classified documents.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he would push to confirm Biden’s pick to lead the Federal Aviation Administration, following a computer system failure that triggered the delay of more than 10,000 flights last week.
An American imprisoned in Iran for seven years launched a hunger strike today to protest his “soul crushing” plight and that of other Americans held in Iran, appealing to Biden to take action to secure their release.
In a letter to Biden, Siamak Namazi called on the president to think of him every day for the seven days he intends to carry out the hunger strike commemorating the grim milestone of seven years since his own release in a prisoner swap.
Biden approved an emergency declaration for California Saturday, after storms that pounded the Golden State since Dec. 26 killed at least 19 people and brought floods, power outages, mudslides, evacuations and road closures.
House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer called fellow Republican Rep. George Santos a “bad guy” in an interview yesterday, but said it’s not up to him whether the under-fire freshman lawmaker should be ousted over his lies.
Months before beginning his first, and unsuccessful, bid for Congress, Santos appeared at an event that urged members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community to leave the Democratic Party and embrace Republicans and Trump, who was president at the time.
At the event, Santos introduced himself as Anthony Devolder, prompting questions about why the congressman has previously gone by different names.
Two former roommates of Santos have claimed that he stole expensive items from them when they lived together in Queens in 2020.
Reps. Dan Goldman and Ritchie Torres asked Speaker Kevin McCarthy, GOP caucus chair Elise Stefanik, and Congressional Leadership Fund President Dan Conston to “proactively and forthrightly cooperate” with all current and future investigations into Santos.
“In addition,” they wrote, “we urge you to inform the American people about your knowledge of Mr. Santos’s web of deceit prior to the election so that the public understands whether and to what extent you were complicit in Mr. Santos’s fraud on his voters.”
Santos inspired no shortage of suspicion during his 2022 campaign, including in the upper echelons of his own party, yet many Republicans looked the other way.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz said Santos “will have to go through the congressional ethics process” but shouldn’t be shunned by his colleagues as it plays out.
Newly minted Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders — who served as White House press secretary in the Trump administration — sidestepped a question about whether she would endorse the former president’s 2024 run.
Dr. David A. Kessler, who for the past two years has been the behind-the-scenes force driving a vast federal effort to develop and distribute coronavirus vaccines and treatments, is leaving the Biden administration.
In the fourth year of the pandemic, Covid-19 is once again spreading across America and being driven by the recent holidays, fewer precautions and the continuing evolution of Omicron subvariants of the virus.
The Omicron subvariant XBB.1.5 (AKA “The Kraken”) is still gaining ground within the United States, accounting for at least 43% of sequenced cases from the last week, according to estimates from the CDC.
Children – even healthy teens and the very young – can have long Covid, several studies have found, and it can follow an infection that’s severe or mild.
China said on Saturday that it had recorded nearly 60,000 fatalities linked to the coronavirus in the month since the country lifted its strict “zero Covid” policy, accelerating an outbreak that is believed to have infected millions of people.
A safety monitoring system flagged that U.S. drugmaker Pfizer and German partner BioNTech’s updated COVID-19 shot could be linked to a type of brain stroke in older adults, according to preliminary data analyzed by U.S. health authorities.
A rapid response analysis of that signal revealed that seniors who got a bivalent booster might be more likely to have ischemic strokes within the first three weeks after their shots, compared with weeks four through six.
Fears that the Covid booster shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech may increase the risk of strokes in people aged 65 and older were not borne out by an intensive scientific investigation, federal officials said.
Colin Farrell, Jamie Lee Curtis, and others have backed out of the Critics Choice Awards after testing positive for COVID just days after attending the Golden Globes.
All of the attendees of the Critics Choice Awards were required to submit a Covid test taken within 72 hours of the event – one of the first major awards in 2023 to require this added measure- after the list of post-Golden Globes positives grew.
A state Supreme Court judge in Syracuse on Friday struck down New York’s statewide mandate for medical staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19, and the Health Department is now “exploring its options.”
The unprecedented infectiousness of XBB.1.5 prompted renewed calls for public caution from New York City health officials, who announced the latest omicron descendant now accounts for nearly three-quarters of all Covid circulating across the five boroughs.
Judge Gerard Neri ruled that Gov. Kathy Hochul and the health department overstepped their authority by sidestepping the Legislature and making permanent the mandate meant to limit transmission of Covid in hospitals and healthcare facilities.
Hochul invoked civil-rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. yesterday as she peddled Judge Hector LaSalle as her controversial pick for chief state judge.
Powerful and prominent Latino leaders and other elected officials – including House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries – joined Hochul to call on the state Senate to support LaSalle’s nomination to be New York’s next top jurist.
Hochul faces the prospect that LaSalle will become the first top judicial nominee to ever be rejected by the state Senate.
LaSalle admitted in his first public comments this week that the outcry against him has been “difficult”.
Hochul is endorsing a measure to phase out the fuels that warm more than 80 percent of homes in New York.
Environmentalist Bill McKibben writes that Hochul’s plan “by an accident of timing…wandered into the middle of a new culture-war battle over gas stoves.”
With housing at the center of her strategy, the governor is seeking to keep business and human capital in New York as population continues to drop.
It’s been a year since New York first allowed mobile sports betting and the results have exceeded expectations. Bettors put up more than $16 billion since the practice was first authorized on Jan. 8, 2022. That’s resulted in more than $709.2 million in taxes.
New York state lawmakers have promised to make helping local governments, schools and hospitals protect against cyber ransomware attacks a top priority during the 2023 legislative session.
As the state slowly rolls out its adult-use marijuana guidelines, medical cannabis company Etain is hoping to make a splash in the newly emerging recreational market before it’s too late.
The mobile phone of the former president of the State Troopers Police Benevolent Association was seized last week when a State Police Special Investigations Unit executed search warrants at the union’s Albany headquarters and the office of a related charity.
Migrants in El Paso, Texas urged Mayor Eric Adams to take them back to the Big Apple with him, because, some said, they heard New York City can help them more than anywhere else.
More than 2,000 miles away from New York City, Adams stood outside a church in Texas surrounded by a group of migrants and told them he would fight for them to be able to work in the United States and to “experience the American dream.”
Adams, whose entering his second year as mayor, said it’s time for the federal government “to do its job,” with city’s like New York being forced to care for thousands of migrants being bussed from the southern border.
Adams said he and fellow municipal leaders around the country would be teaming up to pressure the federal government for assistance handling the migrant crisis.
“We are at our breaking point,” Adams said. “(W)e anticipate being unable to continue sheltering arriving asylum seekers on our own and have submitted an emergency mutual aid request to the State of New York beginning this weekend.”
Adams deserves praise for calling out the Biden administration’s lack of financial support for New York and other cities as they cope with a massive influx of migrants, former Gov. David Paterson said.
Eugene O’Donnell, a former NYPD officer who now lectures at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and once had Adams in his class, said the more tentative approach some cops are now taking lines up with much of Adams’ rhetoric from his days as a cop.
Adams’ first spending proposal for this budget cycle keeps NYPD funding flat — even though the department is one of just two city government agencies that still haven’t met their mandated savings targets.
New York City-run health clinics will soon be able to provide “medical abortions” with pills to terminate a pregnancy — a move critics charge will turn New York into an abortion tourist mecca.
Alvin L. Bragg finished his first year in office with a conviction of the Trump Organization, but he must still contend with rising crime.
Driven by fentanyl’s prevalence and the pandemic’s isolation and despair, drug overdose deaths have soared in New York City, reaching their highest point since the health department began tracking them more than two decades ago.
Two inmates reportedly were stabbed and another overdosed on Saturday as violence and contraband continue to plague Rikers Island.
Local electeds are crying foul on Madison Square Garden’s ban on certain lawyers — and the use of facial recognition technology to impose it.
A couple spent 15 years helping revitalize Cohoes by buying and rehabbing small properties said they are now being ostracized and thwarted by officials in their pursuit of justice after a former tenant did $80,000 worth of damage to one of their buildings.
A small smoke shop in Newburgh continues to be on a hot streak of selling winning lottery tickets.
Schenectady’s landmark Italian restaurants are experiencing a generational change of ownership prompted by aging restaurateurs who are torn between retiring, putting their businesses on the market or closing them entirely.
A longtime attorney for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Albany inadvertently disclosed during a court conference last week that it had recently offered $20 million toward a “global settlement” involving hundreds of alleged child sexual abuse victims.
A plane carrying 68 passengers and four crew members crashed in the city of Pokhara, Nepal, yesterday while trying to land. At least 68 were killed, according to the airline operating the plane and the country’s Civil Aviation Authority.
The Giants’ fourth-quarter stop ended the Vikings’ streak of victories in one-score games and gave the N.F.L. playoffs its first upset by a lower-seeded team.
The Buffalo Bills continued their emotional season with a win against the Miami Dolphins in an AFC Wild Card matchup at Highmark Stadium yesterday as Damar Hamlin watched from home, days after being released from the hospital.
