The Fiery Trial Page 8

  "We can't pass a law, but we can pass a sense-of-the-Congress resolution to let people know where we stand."

  "I don't know how effective that will be," said Rickover, "I think people already know where we stand on this."

  "Yes," said Nelson, "but we can draw a stronger line than that. I want to pass a series of resolutions that enumerate Presidential acts or orders that are illegal and for us to declare that our intention is to see that anyone involved – down to the lowest level – in actually implementing them is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law at the earliest opportunity. To be really effective, I think that we ought to enumerate the exact laws being violated by each order and the criminal and civil penalties for each violation thereof."

  "That's a pretty strong measure," said Rickover, "I mean... The Speaker won't go for it."

  "No," agreed Nelson, "he won't."

  The Oval Office, The White House

  "The reaction is pretty much what you'd expect, Mr. President," said Jamal Anderson as they reviewed the overnight news coverage of the President's order, "the Republicans and business are going nuts, our supporters love it, and a lot of people are befuddled."

  "That's about in line with expectations," noted the President. "What about the financial side of it?"

  "Markets are a mess globally," said the Secretary of the Treasury. "Of course, we don't have any formal signals yet with regard to the U.S. indexes, since you ordered them closed... But it won't be pretty."

  "It'll be a fucking bloodbath," said Daniel Hampton over the speakerphone.

  "Perhaps, but also a necessary one," said the President nonchalantly.

  "Market stabilization measures aren't working anymore," said Hampton from the offices of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

  "Their effectiveness is reduced, to be sure, but I wouldn't go as far..." said the Secretary of the Treasury.

  "I would. And I am in a position to know," said Hampton, cutting the Secretary off.

  "We can't use the measures of the old world to assess the new one," said the President.

  "How do companies pay for their operations tomorrow?" said Hampton.

  "Well, I suppose that we shall require some emergency measures. I think that the Secretary and the Council of Economic Advisors has already worked up some stuff on that," said the President, "I think that we're looking at a relief package much like that imposed upon the banks in 2008. I don't think that the Congress will have any choice but to go along with it now. I was in New York back them and I remember, from Albany, watching how much noise they made and how quickly they folded when the real crisis came."

  "Jesus," said Hampton, "that's a hell of a risk to run, Mr. President. That assumes that our credit and guarantees are worth something like what they were in 2008 and I just don't believe that to be the case. I wish to be proven wrong... But it's a hell of a risk."

  "Keep me informed," said the President, before turning to face his Chief of Staff.

  "Alright, Jamal, how much progress are we making on getting these conspirators tried?"

  "We're definitely running into heavy resistance there as well," said Anderson. "Twenty-seven state Attorneys General have filed various legal motions. Four U.S. Attorneys have resigned. There's a blizzard of injunctions and motions to dismiss flying about from different levels of the Federal Court system."

  "But we are holding the line?" asked Bryan.

  "Yes, Mr. President," came the voice of the Acting Attorney General from another speakerphone.

  "Good," said the President.

  "Now," he said, turning to face his legislative team, "let's talk about how we get our economic emergency package pushed through..."

  Raleigh, NC

  It was a classic rent-a-crowd, but that didn't make it any less impressive-looking on television, especially because the producers were careful to only select close-in shots that made it appear as through the lines of people stretched onwards into eternity.

  Even before the President's announcement had become official, the word had gone out to the Democratic Party's organizers and hangers-one to assemble the troops. Now tens of thousands of them were in the streets all over the country to celebrate the President's decision and to demand that Congress join him in, "rebuilding the economy for the middle class."

  It was sociologically interesting, of course, that the Democrats had a tendency to prattle on about the "middle class" and "working class" while advocating policies that tended to harm both groups by devaluing work and imposing new taxes and regulations that served as a barrier to social mobility. Moreover, the policies imposed by recent Democratic administrations had had the even more malign effect of devaluing what little both groups had in savings. Still, Democratic dominance of much of the media battlespace allowed them to fool tens of millions of otherwise-decent people into believing that modern liberalism was somehow, all reason aside, in their interests. Now millions of those people were on the streets.

  "Greed is hate! Greed is hate!" the crowd was chanting as they marched towards the State Capitol.

  The scene was repeated in all fifty states, as local Democrats and unions frantically coordinated mass protests demanding that the Congress pass what was now euphemistically referred to as the "Economic Reform Act."

  "The time has come," said one of the speakers, a member of the North Carolina State Assembly, "for us to reform the economy of this country in order to ensure that everyone pays their fair share and everyone gets a fair deal."

  Cannon House Office Building, Washington, DC

  "You can't be fucking serious: they asked you for that?" said Terrance Rickover as a glassy-eyed Michael Halverson sat slumped low in his chair.

  "I think that we have to consider it," said the Speaker softly.

  "They want us to ratify the illegal actions that they've taken and pass a few trillion in additional spending? Not just no, but fuck no," said the Majority Leader.

  "You haven't seen the latest numbers," said the Speaker, slurring his words from exhaustion, "the whole economy is on the verge of coming apart. There needs to be strong emergency action taken if we're going to save... the economy."

  "This is a crisis that they caused," said Rickover, "and its one that well be turning into a permanent state of affairs if we don't stop them."

  "I think that a lot of people think that there's blame that ought to be apportioned to both sides," replied Halverson.

  "Bullshit," said Rickover.

  "Well," said the Speaker, "the President was forced to take extreme measures, in large part, due to Congressional intransigence."

  "Absolute nonsense," replied Rickover.

  "This is a time when we have to put the country ahead of party or political advantage," said the Speaker, "I think that we have to bring this package to the floor of the House and limit amendments."

  "No," said Rickover.

  "I think that we have to do this... I don't see any alternative."

  "No," repeated Rickover.

  "I am going to bring this vote to the floor of the House," said the Speaker, the volume of his voice rising.

  "I will not let you," said Rickover.

  "I may not have the majority of the caucus with me," said the Speaker, "but I have the majority of the House. I'm not going to allow a recalcitrant minority to thwart the will of the American people."

  "This conversation is at an end," said Rickover, turning around and storming out of the room.

  Four minutes later, Rickover arrived at his office where more than a dozen members of the House and four Senators were waiting for him.

  "It's as bad as we feared," he said as soon as the door was closed, "he's fallen for the whole thing and he wants to go for it."

  "It's worse in the Senate," commented Jake Reinhardt, the junior Senator from Michigan, "there are enough squishes there that damned near half of the conference is for it."

  "Well," said Michael Nelson, "then it's got to be in the House."

  "What's the count down here?
" asked Reinhardt.

  "The Whip is with the Speaker," said Rickover, "so I only have a leaked count. They say that the Speaker might be able to carry forty votes with him on the final passage of the bill. That's enough – barely – if all of the Democrats in the House vote for it as well. More than enough. That's a ten vote margin."

  "Then the House can't vote on this bill," said Theresa Rowan softly. Until that point the Illinois Representative had been sitting softly in the corner. People turned to look at her.

  "We all agree that this bill must be stopped. Yes?" said Rowan. Nods came from around the room.

  "Then the House must not vote on it," she said, the volume of her voice rising as she spoke.

  "A motion to declare the office of the Speaker vacant is Constitutionally-privileged," she continued, "and it must be disposed of before any other business before the House."

  "Hmmm..." said Nelson, "I see Theresa's point. If the Speaker brings a vote on this bill to the floor, certain members of the House can be induced to vote for it upon the grounds of "economic necessity", especially if it has the backing of a Republican Speaker... But if 80% of the caucus rises in rebellion, that becomes a hell of a lot harder to sell to the folks back home."

  "Shit," said Rickover, checking his watch, "they're going to try and vote for this thing tonight. We have to move."

  "I don't know where half of our members are right now," said Nelson.

  "Half of them aren't even in the fucking city," said Rickover.

  "We can delay in the Senate," noted Reinhardt, "not forever, we don't have the votes. But we can keep things interesting for a while. Enough time for you to rally your own troops."

  Rickover smiled and nodded.

  "Do it," he said.

  "I don't know if we're going to win, but by God we shall fight," declared the Majority Leader as he strode from the room.

  Norfolk, VA

  Martin Green had been sitting and refreshing a dozen different browser windows for hours. He knew that the situation was bad, but he had never expected it to get quite as bad as this.

  "If the President's plan is allowed to pass," he furiously typed, "free enterprise in this country will be effectively at an end."

  Within seconds his Tweet was replied to by half a dozen other people, some of whom praised and agreed with him and others who viciously attacked him as a stooge of the corporations who were somehow "oppressing" all Americans.

  As the minutes checked by Green, in spite of the rapidity with which news was breaking, suddenly found himself "ahead" of the internet. He had already read every commentary of significance. He was reading his own Twitter feeds so fast that he was simply refreshing and waiting for content. He stopped and looked in the screen in silence for a minute.

  Sitting behind the keyboard won't be enough this time, he thought.

  He flipped to another set of Twitter feeds. This one was filled with pictures of the mob descending upon the Capitol, demanding that the Congress accede to the President's demands and pass his bill immediately.

  They don't speak for me, he thought as he watched the pictures and short clips fill his screen.

  Reviving a tired old war cry, the protests that were descending upon DC were being organized around the hashtag #occupythecapitol.

  What classic third-world behavior, Green thought with contempt, the unwashed mob descending upon the capital to demand that everyone comply with the demands of the caudillo.

  "It's time that we #defendthecaptiol," he Tweeted.

  Within thirty seconds, Green's tweet was re-tweeted by a well-known conservative lawyer and author.

  "YES. LET'S DO IT. RT @martingreen442 It's time that we #defendthecapitol."

  That lawyer, as it happened, had 1.2 million followers.

  U.S. Senate

  "Will the Senator yield?" asked Mansour Bey, the junior Senator from Massachusetts.

  "For what purpose does the Senator from Massachusetts ask that I yield?" asked Reinhardt.

  "For a question," replied Bey.

  "I will yield for a question," said Senator Reinhardt.

  "Does the Senator not feel that his action – in adopting such full-bodied tactics of delay at this particular moment in our history – places purely partisan considerations ahead of national ones?"

  "Mr. President," began Reinhardt, "I do not feel that is the case at all. I believe that this is a manufactured crisis whose real aim is to change our form of government. The Founders, in their wisdom, designed a government that was meant to be slow – that was meant to be subject to delays, second consideration, and to tangled bickering. This was not an accident. The institutions of the republic, especially insofar as domestic affairs are concerned, were never designed with expediency as the objective. The Founders did not mean to create a government that would do as much as possible, they meant to create a government that would be capable of doing as little as necessary."

  "The Constitution is meant to be obstructionist. The aim of the Constitution and our government is not to see to it that every whim of a temporary majority is immediately enacted into law, it is to ensure that our liberties are effectively safeguarded from tyranny."

  That brought shouts from the Democratic Senators present.

  "Oh, Mr. President, I know that I'm not supposed to talk about tyranny. That's supposed to be a "triggering" word that motivates extremists into action. In fact, according to this Administration, you can even go to jail for such talk! Though the Constitution says that that is not so in this particular place, I wouldn't be shocked to see them ignore even that."

  U.S. House of Representatives

  Every pizza place and cocaine dealer in the DC metro area was working overtime as the House remained in session into the evening. The talking filibuster begun by Senator Reinhardt had managed to slow proceedings in the Senate enough for Rickover and the rest of the Republican rebels to begin to assemble their forces.

  As midnight came and went, the proceedings in the Senate intensified as seven other Republican Senators came to the floor to join in with the Senator from Michigan. With that many Senators in support of the filibuster – and with the social media momentum behind it making it certain that others would join – there would be enough time for the House Republicans to marshall their forces and give a good accounting of themselves.

  "Keeler is a yes," announced Congressman Nelson as the rebel staffers frantically put together their own whip count.

  "Ok,' said Rickover, "that gets us close."

  The conference room was a mess, with paper and technology scattered across almost every surface. Someone had run out to Target and purchased half a dozen power bars that we strewn across the surface of the table and filled with chargers for every kind of electronic device known to man.

  "I put the count at twelve," said Nelson, wiping his brow and leaning back while squinting at giant whiteboard that someone had managed to haul into the room.

  "Eleven," said Rickover, "we managed to get Hansen onto an earlier flight."

  "Forget the flights," said Nelson, pointing out the window, "I'm increasingly concerned about how the fuck we're going to get people into here."

  The noise of the crowds assembled outside was deafening and the police were struggling to tamp down the confrontations that were occurring between the mob supporting the President on one side and the one supporting the Republicans on the other. No one had been killed or seriously wounded, yet, but several people had been taken to the hospital already and the police had arrested seventy-two people who had attempted to break through the police cordon and enter the Capitol itself while chanting, "Who's House? Our House!" over and over again.

  "They let the pizzas through," said Rickover, leaning over the table to grab a cooling slice.

  "Everyone still has that much working-class solidarity, at least," said Nelson, "and a lot of those guys are pretty savvy. The last one through here told me that when the people accosting him were dirty and unshaven he told them he was delivering to the D
emocrats and when they were clean he said the Republicans."

  "Smart," said Rickover, "but what if he ran into some clean Democrats?"

  "He said it hadn't come up."

  Washington, DC

  Christopher Sorensen had remained glued to the coverage of events in Washington for nearly thirty-six consecutive hours. The Republicans in the Senate continued to stall events there, with Senators now speaking in a rotation to block a final vote on the Economic Reform Act while rumors swirled as to what exactly was going on in the House of Representatives.

  "The fact is," said the lone Democratic panelist on Fox News that afternoon, "is that if the Congress had an up and down vote on this bill today it would be on the President's desk tonight."

  "Indeed," the anchor sonorously intoned, "just this morning a number of America's top CEOs are out with an op-ed piece in the New York Times calling upon the Congress to pass this bill in order to keep the economy from going over a cliff. So there's some fairly broad support behind the bill."

  "This is ridiculous," interjected the editor of the Weekly Standard . "The President has created a crisis by making unilateral decisions that violate the Constitution and basic principles of the separation of powers and then, when those decisions turn around and have consequences – expected consequences, I should add – he demands that the Congress go along with him in the de facto nationalization of around a quarter of the American economy. No to that. A thousand times no."

  "Just today," said the lone Democrat, "we had a major electronic retailer – one that employs more than 100,000 people – say that they're going to close their doors on Friday if this bill doesn't pass, because they won't be able to make payroll. Those are the consequences of inaction here."

  "That's like murdering your parents and pleading for mercy because you're an orphan," said the guy from the Weekly Standard .

  Sorensen heard the door open and he swiftly changed the channel to CNN: he didn't need to have another argument.

  "It's crazy out there," said Sarah as she stepped through the door, "the police have streets closed even many blocks away from the Capitol."