A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  "Fuck!" screamed the President, hanging up the phone.

  Vice President Bryan smiled and turned to his Chief of Staff, Tim Douglas.

  "It would seem that the President is rather upset."

  "So I gathered," Tim replied.

  "The problem with the man is that he doesn't see the long-term picture. Sure, the Republicans are going to vote all sorts of things now -- and they'll try and legislatively stop his Platinum Coin initiative. But that's the point. We will make compromise impossible, and then something will have to break."

  "Well," the President declared, calming the moment he hung up the phone, "I suppose that, between the Republicans and our friend in the Naval Observatory, we'll have to move right away."

  "The question," President Warren smiled as he read from his teleprompter in the Oval Office, "is whether or not we should place the welfare of the whole of the public at risk merely in the hopes of appeasing these grim gods of austerity or whether it is possible and necessary to take bold and decisive action in the name of the good of the whole of the people."

  "I know that there will be some who will charge that, in taking this act, I have exceeded the authority granted to me by the Constitution. You will hear arcane and technical arguments both for and against. I know that some of the lawyers against it will make a convincing case and that they will win over some. However, I am fully confident that the American people – and our judges and courts are nothing more and nothing less than a reflection of the will of those people – will see the wisdom of this act and confirm it."

  The media instantly hailed the President's move as a masterstroke.

  "At long last, someone has the will to stand up to Republican obstructionism on the economy!" one of the network pundits, long ago grown tired of even pretending to be objective, cried with evident glee.

  "Fuck off!" Sorensen howled at the screen.

  "Wow," said Sarah from her pouch on the couch, "I don't think that that's necessary."

  "Oh, come on Sarah," he said, turning to face her, "the President says that he has the right to simply make unlimited amounts of money appear out of thin air and that's just fine with you? This is nonsense. What would you have said if George W. Bush made the same assertion?"

  "I would have considered all sides of it."

  "Bullshit."

  "Look," she said, tightening up her scarf around her neck, "let's not fight about this. We're going to be late for dinner."

  Major Mark Varro was praying for a miracle. He had served seventeen years in the United States Air Force. During those years he had fought in two wars on behalf of his country and spent a third serving in the White House as the President's Military Aide. During that time he had witnessed the progressive degeneration of the country as well as the moral degeneracy of the President himself.

  It had been difficult to the point, ultimately, of being impossible for a Christian such as himself to witness the depravity with which the President behaved on a daily basis. Understanding the necessity of discretion, he had not – when he had first become aware of the President's continuous disregard of his marriage vows – immediately gone to the media or done anything else designed to bring the country or the Presidency into disrepute. Nor did he, a mere Major, seem like the correct man to attempt to appeal to the conscience of the President of the United States. However, he decided after prayerful consultation, someone had to.

  He had not expected his detailed report on all of the acts of infidelity by the President that he was aware of to be cheerfully received by his superiors: Christian truth rarely was. He had not, however, expected it to end his career either.

  His promotion to Lieutenant Colonel, a certainty prior to the filing of his report, was suddenly off-the-table and he was politely-but-firmly invited by no less a figure than the Air Force Chief of Staff himself to explore opportunities in the private sector. The end of his military career had also meant the end of his marriage, as a wife who had never been particularly thrilled by his renewal of faith had walked out the door along with his commission.

  Major Varro, who had been always faithful, was left with nothing. Now, he reflected, this President, who he was certain had violated every oath that he had taken in his life, had sailed from victory to victory. When he had tried to shop his story around during the last election – a record of the repeated infidelities of the President of the United States – he had actually been ignored by all but the most fringe-right media outlets. Now he was watching him on television basically saying that he was going to ignore the Constitution. The same Constitution that Major Varro had taken an oath to uphold. Major Varro began writing – privately, but with the intention of his words someday being made available for public consumption. Whatever some bureaucrat in the Pentagon had to say about it, he believed that he was still a solider and, like all good soldiers, he verified the readiness of his weapons and prepared for action.

  "Good God," said Augustus King as he gazed across the thin strip of water that separated the community of North Vancouver from the village of Belcarra, "I can't believe that there isn't already a bridge here."

  "Politics, all politics," replied Jackson, "environmentalists and NIMBYs."

  "Well, I think that our engineers can put a temporary bridge out here more or less overnight," said King.

  In the aftermath of the First Battle of Vancouver, the Western Republic Army had executed a successful retreat to the North Shore. Since then the fighting in the Greater Vancouver area had been restricted to ongoing harassment efforts by Western partisans inside of the city itself, largely confined to sporadic sniper attacks and the occasional deployment of an improvised explosive device.

  The Federal Army, in the aftermath of the first battle, had been forced to undergo an urgent reorganization as a large number of soldiers and officers refused to participate in combat operations against people they took to be fellow Canadians. Worse still, the Western Army had managed to distribute arms and men all across the Western Provinces, allowing local militias to seize control of cities and towns all across the West. Reinforcements meant to allow the light brigade that had been assembled in the Vancouver area had instead had to be diverted to Calgary after a local militia organized a city-wide uprising that temporarily took control of the city. A full infantry battalion – one of six that were available to the entire government of Canada – had been diverted to the pacification of Red Deer after a local militia had taken over every Federal facility and killed seven employees of the Federal Government in the process.

  Sailors onboard the former HMCS Victoria had mutinied, making the new WRS Victoria the sole combatant of the Western Republic Navy and, in turn, clearing the way of the continued shipment of supplies to the Western Army. King smiled as he looked towards the dock. Among the supplies now being offloaded in North Vancouver were the Western Republic Army's most-prized possessions: thirty-six Israeli-made Merkava tanks that, in keeping with the Western Republic's practice of naming formations based upon their aspirational sizes rather than their present strength, would form the core of the brand-new First Armored Brigade of the WRA.

  "When these tanks are ready to go," noted King as he walked amid the rows of carefully packed vehicles, "the Federals won't know what the fuck hit them."

  Major General Fredrick Kahn had not questioned orders when his Fourth Infantry Division was ordered to execute a rapid movement and to secure the area around Qom.

  "Lock it down fucking hard, Fred," his old friend and fellow West Point graduate General Mackenzie had ordered him. Based upon the urgency of his orders, all four Brigade Combat Teams assigned to the Fourth Division had pulled up stakes from their occupation sectors around Tehran and moved to Qom in just under forty-eight hours. This had, of course, brought wild protests from the Iranian provisional government who were now expected to cover two hundred square miles of territory that had been formerly policed by American soldiers and vehicles. However, General Kahn had gleefully ignored the cries of the Iranians, whose general
incompetence and greed had been a constant source of grief for himself and his men.

  The M1A3 Abrams tanks and M2A3 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles of the Fourth Division were racing rapidly down the road. The scattered insurgents who continued to plague both American and Allied forces did not dare to oppose the might of an entire division, especially one backed by air power. The division's path was scouted by a mix of Predator and Reaper drones, with Apache helicopters and A-10, F-16, and F-35s providing on-call air support. Kahn was not taking any chances given the urgency with which the mission had been passed on to him.

  "No one in and no one out," Kahn had repeated on receiving his orders. Now he was well on the way to executing them. Already his four Brigade Combat Teams were well on their way to the city and preparing to lay out a perimeter that would keep anyone from getting in and out.

  Now, six hours later, the General had moved to a special landing zone that had been designated just outside of the city. Kahn strained his eyes as a half dozen Marine MV-22 Osprey tiltrotor aircraft made a controlled landing on an improvised airfield. The dust practically enveloped the area, temporarily obstructing the vision of Kahn and his Chief of Staff. Per his orders from General Mackenzie, even his driver had been left behind at the Division Command Post.

  Once the dust cloud cleared, the door of the lead Osprey dropped, from which stepped Lieutenant General Avigdor Aronov at the head of a force of Israeli soldiers belonging to the IDF's Sayeret Matkal commando unit.

  "General Aronov," Kahn saluted as Aronov returned his salute.

  "General Kahn," said Aronov, "I, and these other men, are here on a purely unofficial basis. I trust that we are well-understood on that particular point?"

  "We are, General," replied Kahn, "we are also, of course, prepared to extend to you and your men any and all support that is requested and required."

  "Very good. We have no time to waste," responded Aronov.

  "The gentleman from Virginia is recognized pursuant to the rule," the presiding officer – a first-term Congressman from Illinois – announced, as Rickover stood up to speak.

  "Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield myself as much time as I may consume," began the House Majority Leader.

  "All of us, Mr. Speaker, have watched with horror has the pace of global financial turmoil has accelerated since the precipitate actions taken by the President last Thursday. The Dow has dropped 12% as of this counting, the premium on Treasury Bills has spiked, and the value of the dollar has fallen. And all that the President and his defenders in the other party have to say for this is that, well, it's not as bad as it might have been.

  I will grant you that, Mr. Speaker. It is not as bad as it might have been. Indeed, Mr. Speaker, it is worse. It would be better, in so many ways, if the result of the President's flagrant abuse of his Constitutional authority was entirely catastrophic rather than mildly catastrophic because the results would then serve as a more objective example to other tyrants."

  The last remark, unusually for the U.S. House of Representatives, drew calls of derision from other members of the House. The presiding officer availed himself of his gavel.

  "The House will come to order," he said.

  "Yes, Mr. Speaker," Rickover continued, "tyranny is not too strong a word for it. The President and his allies believe that government is the alpha and the omega, the father and the son, the beginning and the end. They believe that the government is – and by right ought to be – the great leveler in our society. To that end, they will not hesitate to resort to any measure – even the most drastic – in order to maintain their own vision of the government. But, emphatically, that vision is not the vision of the Founders. When the President and the permanent establishment has the right to spend without the consent of the representatives of the people – when they are allowed to adopt this policy of taxation-by-debasement – we find the whole order of our system reversed. Under this President the people are made the servants of the government and not the government the servant of the people.

  "We all know the numbers and we all know that they don't add up. Some foolish men of previous generations have made promises that cannot be realistically kept. We know that. Keeping the spending promises made by those previous generations will not only consume every dollar that exists in the Treasury but more than exist in the whole of the country.

  "That which cannot continue will not do so indefinitely. Now, given this, we have a choice to make - a vital and world-changing choice. Either we have the courage of our convictions and declare that we will not simply be the slaves of events, or we become complicit in attempting to preserve that which must and shall not ultimately survive and, in so doing, we sacrifice our own souls."

  "The question is not whether the President has committed a crime in a strictly legalistic sense. We all have heard what they lawyers have to say. We know that the legal actions arising from the President's order will take years to sort out. We know that. And we are told that there is nothing that can be done. That, in the words of the President, 'elections have consequences.'

  "And, they do, my friends. They truly do. As the American people entrusted him with the Presidency so too they gave us of the Congress the power to act against him should their trust prove to be misplaced. This is the way of things. It is how things are meant to be in America. Power acts against power. The Congress, under our Constitution, has the power to remove the President from office for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. This, and not merely the law itself, is the ultimate check upon the power of a President.

  "The actions of the President, in usurping powers that properly belong to the Congress of the United States – in assuming a power to tax and spend of a virtually unlimited character – fall precisely under the definition of a high crime and misdemeanor as intended by the authors of the Constitution. The question is not simply whether the actions of the President are legal – and I maintain that they are not – but whether they are consistent with the conduct of the Chief Executive of a republic. Can anyone truly dispute that they are not?

  "Therefore, I am introducing a resolution before this House. To wit, that nothing in existing law authorizes the President to issue money in the fashion proposed and that, so doing, would, in the opinion of this House, constitution an impeachable offense on the part of the President."

  At the Pentagon, General Richard Hall sat in his office and flipped through the latest reports coming from Central Command as he sipped a cup of coffee. The Army Chief of Staff had long favored reading reports directly, rather than simply being briefed on their contents by subordinates. In the course of a thirty-four-year career in the United States Army, beginning with a stint at West Point where he had graduated second in his class, his keen eye for details had been critical to his progressive advance from one success to another.

  The 4th Infantry Division, Hall noted, had left its positions near Tehran and had now moved south to Qom. There was nothing particularly unusual in that, given that the US Army was still engaged in fighting off desultory efforts by the remnants of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and other elements to carry on the fight on behalf of the dead regime. With a quick click he flipped through some of the other reports that had had been copied on. It was five minutes later, when reading fuel consumption reports by the Third Army, that he saw something to give him pause. General Hall opened Excel and began cutting and pasting figures across reports that spanned several weeks. When he was done, he checked the figures a second time before saving the file and forwarding it to a subordinate.

  Mike, he wrote, these fuel consumption figures for the Third Army look off to me. Can you have someone double-check them and see what's up?

  A few hours later, the report he had requested hit his inbox. Quick calculations indicated that, in fact, the Third Army was using nearly twice as much fuel as its operational reports suggested it ought to be using. Curiouser and curiouser, thought Hall as he read the back-of-the-envelope figures. He briefly considered w
riting General Mackenzie directly but he knew, based upon long and tortuous experience, he would receive an other-than-welcome response to an inquiry that some, especially the officious CENTCOM commander, would regard as an invasion of their exclusive prerogatives. Instead he sent another e-mail, this one to a different subordinate, asking him to take a look and see if it were possible to reconcile the reported pace of operations by the Third Army with higher consumption of not only fuel but other goods as well than were suggested by the official reports.

  The Prime Minister checked and re-checked the figures in front of him. They were, to put it simply, mind-numbingly awful. He flipped them over in his hands, squinted, and then set them back down upon the conference table. Finally, he spoke.

  "Can it really be as bad as this?"

  "I'm afraid so, Prime Minister," the Chief of the Defense Staff apologetically explained. "The Army was never very large. It's been decades since we deployed a complete Division either within Canada or anywhere else in the world. We simply don't have that many soldiers and we are having a terrible time recruiting more, especially for the purpose of fighting other Canadians."

  "I understand," said the Prime Minister, "thank you, General. I believe that at this point, the discussion must become one of a rather more political nature."

  "Of course," said the General, who quietly gathered his papers and left the room.

  "The plain truth, Prime Minister," the Deputy Prime Minister finally spoke up, "is that we can't fight a war without soldiers. At the present time I don't know if we have a single reliable battalion, let alone the sort of forces that would be necessary to put down the smaller revolts throughout the West. When people are willing to shoot at their own flag, it requires rather extraordinary efforts to convince others to put them down."

  The Prime Minister looked across the table at the NDP Leader for a good ten seconds before he responded.

  "In other words, the rebellion will only be defeated by a complete national mobilization."