"This is our fucking city."—David Ortiz, prominent local immigrant.

BOSTON—It struck me as I was negotiating eastbound flow along the packed, narrow sidewalks of Newbury Street in Boston's Back Bay on Sunday that the last time I was surfing a crowd in this place and in this direction was on the horrible afternoon of April 15, 2013 in the aftermath of the death and destruction wrought on this city by the Tsarnaev brothers, two terrorists who would not have been detained by the executive order that swept up children and 83-year-old Iranian grandmothers on Friday night. I turned up Exeter Street toward Copley Square, and I remembered that it was right around here on that afternoon that you began to smell the smoke and that awful coppery smell of blood that goes right to the back of your throat and stays there.

Today, you smelled incense from a group of Buddhists gathered on Boylston Street, and the call of the sirens was replaced by the brassy swing of an impromptu second-line band playing in the middle of Dartmouth Street in front of the old entrance to the Boston Public Library.

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Copley Square is struck deep with the irons of history. The huge Trinity Church that faces west represents a worship community that goes back to 1733. (The original was located in an older part of the city that burned in the Great Fire of 1872.) It faces the old façade of the BPL, the one in which are carved the names of the great scientists and philosophers of history and over the front door of which are carved the words, "Free to All."

In the cramped and fevered minds that now inhabit the White House, this would be a place where fear came to settle in, the kind of fear on which those cramped and fevered minds depended when they launched their assault on immigration and democratic norms with their ill-conceived and badly drafted—to say nothing of morally reprehensible and politically stupid—executive order on Friday afternoon. They assumed we would still smell the blood and cower. Instead, 25,000 people gathered in Copley Square, and hundreds of thousands of other people gathered around the country, to oppose not only this policy, but the kind of minds that would concoct and defend it.

Very much like the massive march in Washington a week earlier, this was a friendly, family crowd, with more (and more varied) breeds of friendly dogs than you could see in a month of Alpo commercials. (My favorite was the burly, thick-shouldered specimen with a sign around its neck reading, "Pitbulls Against Discrimination." Good to know that.)

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On the edge of the crowd along Boylston Street, I met Sophia, which is not her real name, because she'd rather not have her real name bandied about right now. According to a woman from her mosque who acts as her interpreter, Sophia is a Syrian refugee from a town outside Damascus that once was a suburb, before it was rendered a wasteland. She was married and had seven children. One day, four years ago, one of her three boys was playing outside the house and somebody shot him in the leg. Sophia's husband and five of their children fled to Jordan, where they live today in a refugee camp that is gradually becoming a permanent settlement for Syrian exiles. Sophia and her wounded son came to Boston to seek treatment for the lasting effect of his wound. She then applied for asylum. She has been waiting for four years. On Friday, she was told that her application had been "suspended."

"People are so good here," she said. "My boy, he is in a cast, but he is doing well."

Four years in limbo, and then a darker, more uncertain limbo descends. This is what happened on Friday evening.

The Boston rally was called by Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, who has stood up boldly over the past couple of weeks. He went out to Logan Airport on Friday night to stand with the protestors. Then he called the rally, writing for CNN:

In the meantime, we'll continue to build trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities. For everyone's safety, both documented and undocumented immigrants need to know they can report crimes without fear of being targeted over civil issues or mere suspicions. The Boston Police Department has worked hard to build this trust while focusing its energies on serious crimes. Cities with "Trust Acts" are among the safest in the United States. We won't be intimidated by threats to our federal funding, either. The Supreme Court has ruled that federal funds may not be withdrawn over issues unrelated to the funding legislation's purposes. In any case, we won't place money ahead of our neighbors' safety and security.

Mayah Mahty's got a hahht and some wicked big brass ones.

(And to be entirely fair, Boston city councilor Tito Jackson, who's already announced he's running against Walsh next time, also got involved.)

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Senator Professor Warren checked in, too, at the airport and at the rally. She was joined there by Senator Edward Markey and by Congressman Joe Kennedy. From WBUR:

Kennedy brought his wife and daughter to the rally. "Watching the events of what's happened to this country over the past 36 hours, I think like a lot of people here I felt sick to my stomach," Kennedy said. "To know that we are now a full week into a Trump presidency and there's been hundreds of thousands of people out on consecutive weekends across our country trying to remind the president and his administration the values that we stand for."

Elsewhere, Congressman Seth Moulton, an Iraq war vet and someone whose national profile is beginning to explode, got on the electric Twitter machine and minced not a word.

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.@realDonaldTrump: Your #MuslimBan is completely at odds with our most fundamental value: freedom. I'm ashamed that you are our president. pic.twitter.com/zVGophHFvT — Seth Moulton (@sethmoulton) January 29, 2017

(This got Moulton props from, of all people, Bill Kristol. Run away, congressman! Run far away! Don't look back! I'm all for bipartisanship but this guy's been wrong about everything for 30 years. He's a human juju rattle. Run away!)

And Attorney General Maura Healey joined 15 other attorneys general in condemning the president*s edict. It was an altogether remarkable weekend for Massachusetts pols of the Democratic variety. However, it also was a weekend in which it became plain that the executive branch of the government has fallen into the hands of the strange, the mad, and the twisted. It wasn't just this executive order, but the other one as well, the one that "reordered" the National Security Council so that the Secretaries of Defense and of Homeland Security, as well as the Joint Chiefs and the director of the CIA, have to be invited to the principals meeting, but Steve Bannon, who a year ago was running the "Black Crime" section at Breitbart News, has an open invitation to sit on down any time he wants.

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Bannon is a unique combination of the essential amorality of the modern American corporate elite—he did luxurious time at Goldman Sachs—and a kind of fundamental American political evil. His fingerprints are all over the events of the past weekend. There isn't a chance in hell that he didn't know that signing this executive order on Holocaust Remembrance Day wouldn't throw the outrage into overdrive, any more than he wasn't behind the appalling proclamation in which Jewish victims of the Holocaust are not mentioned.

(Yes, you have my onetime permission to ask, "What if Obama did this?")

On Sunday, White House chief of staff and obvious anagram Reince Priebus had a chance to walk this latter abomination back. This is what he said to my man Chuck Todd on Meet The Press:

"I'm not whitewashing anything… It's a terrible time in history and obviously, you know that President Trump has dear family members that are Jewish and there was no harm or ill will or offense intended by any of that… I don't regret the words ... I'm trying to clear it up for you." "Everyone's suffering in the Holocaust, including obviously all of the Jewish people affected and the miserable genocide that occurred is something that we consider to be extraordinarily sad and something that can never be forgotten."

Yes, it's All Lives Matter. About the Holocaust.

Good god.

But it was the immigration order that ignited the weekend, first at airports across the country and then at places like Copley Square. I am trying to remember a time in my life where every constitutional institution seemed to be teetering on edge the way that it seems that they are now.

The closest I can come is the immediate aftermath of the "Saturday Night Massacre" in 1973, when Richard Nixon fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, and then Eliot Richardson and William Ruckelshaus quit rather than carry out the order. That night the FBI sealed the special prosecutor's office. Nobody was sure what side the Department of Justice was on or what might happen next. People in Washington legitimately feared that Nixon would call out the Army. (Later, of course, we learned that Nixon had sunk so deeply into alcoholic dementia that Alexander Haig and Henry Kissinger did everything but relieve him of his belt and shoes.) Everything permanent seemed to be dissolving into a foul cloud.

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That's where we seem to be today. What is anybody sure of? After this weekend, there can be no doubt that the Democrats in Congress now have to form a solid bloc against any and all nominations until such time as the Executive Branch regains a modicum of sanity. And even if they do, denying unanimous consent at all turns seems to be the only real club they have in the bag. And the Republicans have to decide, once and for all, if they stand for the republic or for one man's ghastly view of his fellow humans and the world they've created.

Paul Ryan has made it clear that he would support Caligula if Caligula's horse promised to vote in the Senate to cut the estate tax, so he's hopeless. Saying, as did Senators Ben Sasse and Susan Collins, that the problem with the president*'s order is that it's "too broad" is mushy nonsense. Senator Bob Corker's lament that it was badly drawn will not do, either. The problem is that the order is a moral and political abomination, not that it's badly worded. Jesus H. Christ on an oxcart, syntax is the least of our problems.

This is a gut check on the Constitution and on our identity as a nation for all concerned. People bled on the bricks where people walked in Boston on Sunday. Then they came back the next year to run, and the next year after that, and they will be there again this April, from all over the world, god willing.

As the rally was breaking up, right in the middle of Dartmouth Street, Dominic Burdick, a software designer from Dublin and a Boston native since 1997, led his impromptu band through rollicking second-line renditions of all the old Movement anthems, ending up with "When The Saints Go Marching In," because why not? Burdick is a member of something called the Boston Area Brigade of Active Musicians, a group that throws itself together on odd occasions like this one. They haul their instruments around and anyone who wants to bang on a drum can join in. A turn with the cowbell is particularly prized—thank you, Christopher Walken.

"At first, we asked if we could play right here on the steps, right?" Burdick said. "They told us no. But we thought, hell, let's bring the instruments down here and play anyway. Resistance first, apologies later, right?"

It goes on. It is the second week of the new administration.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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