The Fiery Trial Read online

  "The trial itself surely is," agreed King, "but there are other elements and greater issues at play here."

  "Oh, I know that, Mr. King," replied Randall.

  "That's very good," said King, "because we need your help."

  "Who, in this particular case, is we?" asked the Governor.

  "Freedom has many friends in this country," replied King.

  "Well," said the Governor, "what would you have me do at this juncture?"

  "I want the State of Washington to join a coalition of other states that are directly challenging the unconstitutional actions of the Federal Government. Not only in a legal sense, but in a political sense as well."

  King gripped his hands together and then spread them apart, grabbing the arms of his chair.

  "To be even more exact, we want you to lead the State of Washington – and others – towards the calling of an Article V Convention to propose Amendments to the Constitution, specifically for the purpose of limiting the powers of the Federal Government."

  "I don't have a majority in the State Legislature," pointed out the Governor.

  "Let me know what you need to make one for this," replied King.

  New York, NY

  "How much money did we make investing in the Western Revolution?" asked Augustus King over the video link.

  "I'll grant that, Bill," replied the former Secretary of State, sighing deeply, "but this is a much graver matter than that."

  "Is it?" asked King.

  "This is what we do," continued the soldier. "We are national turnaround artists. We find struggling nations – or would-be nations – with political systems in chaos and we invest in those nations and take a direct hand in guiding those places back to order and prosperity. It just happens that today the nation that requires our assistance is the United States of America."

  "Jeeesus," said the former Governor of Mississippi, "that's just plain fucking nuts."

  "No," replied King, "it's not. I'd remind you that, in total, we have the better part of a trillion dollars in assets sloshing around the world – that's an awful Goddamned lot of money even with inflation – and there's no way that we're going to be able to preserve that value if the United States maintains its present course. Sure, we can – and we are – converting everything that we can and moving it out of the country, but there's a lot of real estate, plants, and what have you that we just can't move."

  "You have to consider the possibility," noted the Governor, "that this President is going to come for us."

  "Oh, I have. We'll be ready for that," said King to skeptical looks from around the table.

  "Look, gentlemen," he said, "I founded this company with a billion dollars and my training in the Army. I did it because I could see the way the world was headed and I wanted to do everything in my power to change that. I knew, even back then, that real change could only be driven by those with military and financial power, so I chose to turn what I had – and I had enough to retire and spend my life in luxury – into something that could really make a difference.

  "It's funny, you know. You go to school in this country and they're all about 'making a difference' and 'changing the world', but they don't seem to recognize that every change of significance that has ever happened has occurred as a result of the strange nexus between lawyers, guns, and money. Well, now we have plenty of all three and we are going to use them."

  The ex-Secretary shook his head.

  "In for a penny..." he muttered before asking, "what do you need?"

  "I already have it. Billions in cash. This President is attempting to extend executive power in extra-Constitutional ways, by abusing the Justice Department, by taking advantage of every loophole that exists in the law to print or to steal money... It's only a matter of time before he goes further than that. We need to fund the legal defenses of those who are victims of judicial abuse. We need to organize Federal politicians and state governments who are opposed to the extension of executive power. In the meantime, I want to channel money back into America. Everyone else is selling, now is the time for us to buy. Let's buy land, buy whole companies – anything like that. Not securities, though. I don't know what's going to happen to those."

  NBC News, New York City, NY

  "...This just in to NBC News here in New York City. This is breaking news that's just been released by the Associated Press," explained the afternoon anchor as NBC and every other news network of consequence broke into its regular programming.

  "The Justice Department has announced that a special Grand Jury in Washington, DC has handed out some seven-hundred-and-eighteen indictments against individuals charged with conspiracy in relation to the assassination of President Warren."

  "This," continued the anchor, turning to the network's legal analyst, "is just really staggering news. I know that all of us were aware of the continued investigation and the empaneling of a Grand Jury to look into events around the assassination, but this indictment... Which covers a mix of political and media figures as well as private citizens... That's just really without precedent. Is it not?"

  "It is," agreed the analyst, "but the government believes that it has a strong case here. The position taken throughout this process by the Justice Department has been that those who engaged in what they describe as 'eliminationist rhetoric' – that is to say that words that could be taken as suggestive of extreme measures against President Warren – were potentially guilty of Federal Crimes under existing law..."

  Fox News, New York City

  "This seems a stretch, at best, and a dangerous one," said the anchor.

  "Well, yes and no," replied the columnist from the New York Post , "this is an untested area of the law. What the Justice Department contends is that some forms of rhetoric, even if they stopped short of actually calling for the death of President Warren, qualified as incitement and inducement under Federal Law."

  "Oh, come on," said one of the other panelists.

  "I'm not saying that I agree, but hear me out," replied the Post columnist.

  "What they're saying is that if you went and wrote something like, 'this President has to be stopped at any cost,' that's equivalent to a mob boss talking about a witness with one of his lieutenants and saying something like, 'it would be to our advantage if he stopped talking.' There have been cases like that, where criminal figures have been convicted of conspiracy and what have you without actually issuing direct orders. The Justice Department's theory of the case is that this worked in a similar fashion."

  "That's absurd. This is the biggest attempt by the Federal Government to trespass against free speech since the First World War. Perhaps even all the way back to the Alien and Sedition Acts."

  "Well, look," ventured the lone Democratic panelist, looking uncomfortable, "reading these indictments, I would note that the prosecutors have been very careful in this. They haven't gone in and arrested every Republican in the country or anything of the sort. My reading of this is that they've carefully only gone after those whose comments have crossed the line from ordinary political commentary into the sort of words that might actually incite violence. And, I'll remind you, that we've only moved so far as the indictment stage – the whole of the judicial process has yet to play out in this case, but it will be allowed to do so."

  MSNBC Studios, Washington, DC

  "...It's long past time that we take a real look at the state of the right in this country," said the MSNBC host, "years ago, when Gabrielle Giffords was shot, a lot of people said that we had to look at the atmosphere of hate that was being allowed to build up – that was being fostered by certain individuals for commercial gain. I'm glad that the Justice Department has finally approached this matter with the seriousness that it deserves."

  "Indeed," agreed the former Democratic Congressman from Ohio, "it's long past time that we recognized – as has been upheld by many courts in this land – that the Constitution protects free speech, not hate speech."

  "We see it time and time again," continued th
e host, "where people on the right commit these spectacular acts of violence and no one has done anything. I just think that it's sad that it took the death of President Warren to finally bring about a true examination of the atmosphere of hate that really does exist here in America. When people say hateful things about gays, lesbians, transsexuals, Muslims – all of the groups that Republicans hate – they often act to trigger acts of violence in others. Now, I'm not saying that all of that is intentional or that all Republicans condone the murder of minorities, but it's definitely something that needs to be looked into in an official sense."

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Crisis

  The Oval Office, The White House

  President Kevin Bryan read through his morning press briefing with satisfaction. One of the great advantages of the severe polarization of the country, he realized, was that partisans on his side were apt to defend him, no matter what he did and partisans on the other were going to attack him under any circumstances. The rhetoric on both sides was so continuous and overheated that the apolitical middle didn't really understand what was going on and, therefore, were prone to split the difference. As a result of this, the mass arrests of political conservatives conducted by the Justice Department, while they didn't poll particularly well, had also failed to arouse additional opposition.

  The economy was more of a problem. Its free-fall continued without abatement. Even here, however, the President benefited from the lowered expectations of the American people: everything had been so terrible for so long that people were immune to bad news. This presented him with an opportunity.

  "This is iffy, at best, Mr. President," said the Secretary of the Treasury on reading the Executive Order drafted by a junior attorney at the White House Counsel's office.

  "Perhaps," conceded the President, "but it really just needs to be plausible. Is it that?"

  "I suppose," replied the Secretary after a pause.

  "Will it work?" the President pressed.

  "Define work."

  "Look," the President got up from his chair and walked around to sit on the desk, "the question is whether or not this will be able to be enacted."

  "My opinion – as the Secretary of the Treasury and as an attorney – is that this will create a mess of litigation unlike anything that we've seen in recent memory. The International Emergency Economic Powers Act was meant for, you know, seizing a Japan's assets after a Pearl Harbor or an Iran after a hostage crisis. It hasn't be applied to individual companies before on the theory that their business practices constitute a hostile act in and of themselves. I've held to your orders and not circulated the draft, but I expect that you would get the same answer from the lawyers over at the Department."

  "The counsel's office has looked into this question," said the President, "and we think that we have a work-around."

  He grabbed another sheet of paper from his desk and handed it to the Secretary who paused for several seconds to read it.

  "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it," commented the Secretary softly.

  "Something like that," said the President.

  The Secretary whistled, "that's bold. I'll give it that. But what happens after that?"

  "The greatest opportunities," said the President, who had begun walking in circles around the perimeter of the Oval Office, "come in moments of maximum crisis. We all agree – at least in this room we agree – that economic reform can't wait. Therefore we are going to create a situation where economic reform is the only answer to the questions at hand."

  Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC

  "Alright, shut up!" yelled Terrance Rickover over the din of the whole House Republican Conference speaking at once.

  "We need order," said Michael Halverson, the Speaker of the House, raising his hands in the air to no avail.

  "Fuck," muttered Rickover. He picked up a book from one of the desks and hurled it into one of the television monitors that hung in the front of the room, shattering it and allowing quiet to descend upon the place.

  "Ok," he said, "I know that everyone is upset. But we can't have this meeting if everyone else won't shut the fuck up."

  The Majority Leader paused for a moment before calling on the lone Republican from Massachusetts.

  "Yeah. Go, Cal."

  "They came and arrested a talk show host from my district. They claimed that a broadcast of his where he said that the "President is violating both the letter and the spirit of the Constitution and we have to stop him" constituted incitement to murder."

  "Look," replied Rickover, "I know. There are seven hundred and seventeen other equally outrageous stories."

  "Well, what are we going to do about it?" shouted a Representative from Missouri to general agreement.

  "We need to consider all of our options," said the Speaker, "but I believe that we should let the justice system take its course. Yes, these indictments have been brought and there is reason to consider them to be illegitimate, but I have confidence in our judges and juries..."

  "Come on!" called out one Congressman to general agreement. Rickover stood up.

  "With all due respect to the Speaker, I agree with you: there needs to be a robust response to this. I have one: let's shut down the government."

  "That hasn't worked out so well for us in the past," pointed out Michael Nelson.

  "I understand that," said Rickover, "but it's also the real power that the Congress has. At least, without a super-majority. We can refuse the power of the purse to this President unless he assents to laws that would ban his activities."

  "The President has already repeatedly proven to be willing to exceed the Constitution and that he's more than willing to ignore laws passed by this Congress. What's to prevent him from spending without a budget or from signing the resolutions that we pass and then ignoring the restrictions set out in them?"

  "I don't know," admitted Rickover, "we'll have to cross that particular bridge when we arrive at it."

  "I think," interjected Speaker Halverson, "that this is still a little bit premature. I don't think that there's a public appetite for extreme measures. The truth be told, the polling still says that the President has some support for his crackdown on what he insists on referring to as 'hate speech.' I don't agree with any of that, but I think we have to recognize that there is that sentiment out there in the country."

  "Bullshit!" shouted one Congressman. The Speaker raised his hands.

  "I didn't say that I agreed, Jack – but it exists," maintained the Speaker.

  There were murmurs throughout the assembled crowd.

  "Look," Michael Nelson took the floor, "there are times when the acts of a tyrant – and I use that word knowingly and advisedly – become intolerable. I believe that this is one of those times and that, in view of that, we are now have an obligation to more than simply talk these matters over eternally."

  "What would you have us do?" said Halverson, "we've opposed this President with a full legislative program, just as we did his predecessor. We even tried to impeach the last guy – as you were fully for – and we are in no better a place today for any of it. I don't know that there's anything more that we can do."

  "Nothing more that you can do, old man," sneered Nelson. He tried to speak further but could not make himself heard over the uproar.

  Olympia, Washington

  Governor Mitchell Randall hadn't asked what had motivated a half-dozen Democratic legislators to flip their vote in favor of endorsing an Article V convention to amend the Constitution. He was pretty sure that he didn't want to know. That convention – with news that Iowa had also passed a resolution calling for a general convention to propose amendments to the Constitution – had been the biggest news in the land until just before the close of business on Friday. Then a terse release from the White House Press Office had caused the world in general – and Mitchell Randall's world in particular – to explode.

  "In accordance with the provisions of the International
Emergency Economic Powers Act, the President has issued a number of orders that have the effect of seizing the assets of hostile foreign entities that have engaged in acts of economic warfare against the United States," was the complete text of the release, which was followed five minutes later by another announcing that the President would address the nation in an hour.

  "I've just gotten the call," the CEO of a major software company was screaming over one phone line, "they've seized every fucking asset that they could tie to any of our foreign subsidiaries. We're talking billions of fucking dollars. No one here has any idea how the fuck our operations even work tomorrow!"

  "This is out of control!" a talk show host was shouting on the television, "this is wholly out of fucking..." a bleep came a second too late, "control and we'll be lucky to get out of this in one piece."

  The Governor sat down in his chair and allowed himself to physically sink into the cushions. He was generally regarded as a moderate Republican in his politics. In fact, he had managed to get the inside track on his opponent with some voters in the last General Election by pointing out that he had supported the legalization of homosexual marriage in Washington State whereas his Democratic opponent had been against it. He was certainly no radical or revolutionary in his political orientation. Yet, even so, the actions of this Administration were pushing him to adopt views that just a few months earlier would have been considered shocking or radical. No one wanted to hold a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution because they were satisfied with the status quo.

  "What if it doesn't work?" he said aloud to no one in particular.

  "I'm sorry, what did you say, Governor?" asked Sally Magnussen, his deputy Press Secretary.

  The Governor pointed at the television.

  "Sally," he said, "for the first time in my adult life I am genuinely afraid for the future of this country. Its survival – at least in its present form – depends upon our ability to communicate and compromise. And if we can't do that... Then what?"