Shining City

by Tom Rosenstiel

  She looks stunning in a tan skirt and pastel yellow top. She reminds Rena of the women in those ads from that New York designer who uses her friends rather than teenage models to feature her clothes. Adult good-looking women with good taste.

  Rena is excited to see her—surprised by how excited he is. Then she offers him a smile that he knows instantly will be the best part of his day.

  “I heard you were coming to help,” he says.

  “I doubt Dad needs it.”

  “I think we’re the ones who need it.”

  “I doubt that, too,” she says with a sly smile.

  He had forgotten how smoky her eyes were. Maybe, Rena thinks to himself, the nomination might drag on for months.

  “It’s good to see you, soldier,” she says.

  He remembered when she called him that in California. He liked it then, too.

  “I’m very glad you’re here,” he hears himself say.

  “I don’t know the city well. Maybe you can show me around.”

  Just then Brooks bursts into the room with an enthusiastic “Hey, you two” and envelops both Madisons in an enormous group hug. When the bubbling and cooing are finished, Brooks releases them and everyone finds a chair around the conference table.

  In the three weeks since Madison was nominated, the first wave of press about the nomination has surged and subsided. The first visit to Capitol Hill for meetings with senators three days after the announcement had gone fine after a friendly talk with Brooks to ensure he behaved. Good-cop stuff.

  The political scorekeeping so far is fair—better than it might have been. The far Right was digging but hadn’t unearthed anything serious. “He’s a bit kooky if you want to know the truth. Lives in a log cabin, a Berkeley Birkenstock type” a group called Justice for Justice had emailed widely, quoting from a blogger who called himself “Freedom’s Patriot 76.” If that was the worst they have, bring it. The Common Sense crowd was also quiet so far.

  Two Madison positions seemed to be causing the most trouble with conservatives—his repudiation of the Court’s recent decisions on free speech and his criticism of strict constructionism on original intent. But Madison had support from some conservative scholars, and there were signs at least one important political group, the National Rifle Association, might endorse him.

  Disappointed liberals have been mildly supportive. That includes the abortion rights groups.

  Rena looks at Madison. Does the judge have any notion of how slim a margin he has? He still doesn’t have a good read on the man. Their real preparations begin now.

  He takes a breath, exhales—old timing techniques from soccer—and begins to outline what will happen next.

  The plan has been carefully crafted with the White House and a team of party veterans who have been through this before, with refinements by Rena and Brooks.

  “Today is the first day of Phase Two, the process of preparation. You may know all this, and if so, bear with me, but it is best to go over all of it step by step. You already toured the Senate, those courtesy calls we did after you were named. Well, there will be a few more of those, a chance for key senators to meet you privately, one-on-one. It’s sizing you up. Like meeting the new neighbor. Are you nice? Are you smart? This time without the TV cameras. You need to be charming with these senators. Be interested. Be humble. Be smart. Answer their questions in the most general way. And don’t tell them, please, that you think this process is a sham.”

  Vic laughs a little.

  “Then we start preparing for your testimony.”

  Brooks takes over this part of the narrative.

  “We’re going to begin today by showing you tapes of the testimony of past nominees. We also have transcripts of the questions that have been asked of the last four nominees, and some of the answers, but we will spare you most of them. You will take the transcripts home to study them. Look for patterns. And we will talk about them when you’re done.”

  Vic nods. Her father catches her eye, turns to Brooks and Rena, and nods as well.

  “And then we will start your murder boards,” Brooks says.

  “I’m sorry, our what?” Vic asks.

  “Murder boards.”

  “Sounds dangerous,” Vic says with a questioning smile.

  “They’re the practice sessions for your Judiciary Committee testimony. Think moot court. Lawyers who’ve worked in the Senate or the White House will ask you questions they think the senators will ask. In the last one or two sessions, the lawyers helping with this will actually play the role of the specific Judiciary Committee members, asking the questions we think that particular senator will pose.”

  “Why are they called murder boards?” Vic asks.

  “Because they’re supposed to be murder,” Brooks says. “The military coined the term, preparing brass for hearings. It’s a trumped-up name.”

  Rena notices Madison shift in his chair. The prospect of rehearsing his ideas probably irritates him. And the notion that answering senators’ questions could be murderous or even difficult probably strikes him as absurd.

  “Understand, Rollie, this process is not about the senators getting to know you or what you really think. You get that, right?”

  “I do, Peter.”

  No, he doesn’t, Rena thinks.

  “Let me put it this way. Assume you start with a hundred votes to confirm. All you can do by answering questions is lose votes. . . . You will get the Republicans you need, if you don’t give them a reason to vote no. That is what we are trying to do for the next month. Not give people a reason to vote no. That’s all.”

  In other words, don’t tell people what you think. Be superficial. That’s how you’ll get ahead. Be everything you don’t believe in.

  “There are no second chances to be on the high court,” Brooks says. “There is no learning curve. You only get one hearing.”

  If they push this too hard now, Madison will push back. Rena wants to make this seem more mundane, more mechanical. But he also needs to be clear. “These sessions will be held at the Justice Department, and some at the Old EOB,” he says, referring to the Gothic building next to the White House.

  “Okay, let’s review where you are. With a 53–47 Republican majority, you need four opposition party votes. If we lose any Democrats, we’ll need more than that.”

  “We know the math,” Madison says.

  “To get there, you will need to win some people over personally in private, to persuade them you’re someone they would like to have over for dinner regardless of your legal theories. Okay?”

  Madison nods.

  “So let’s go over the committee,” Brooks continues. “You’ll have every Democrat. You need two Republicans minimum, and you want to try to get the majority of them.”

  Another nod.

  “Your best chance to start with the Republicans is Wendy Upton of Arizona. She’s a former military prosecutor. She’s the sharpest lawyer on the panel in either party. Upton also sees value in compromise. But she’s struggling to navigate a new harsher political world. Still, if you can get her, you may get some other Republicans.”

  Vic is taking notes, but not her father.

  “When we did our visits, only one senator seemed rude, Jack Fiddler of Wyoming. He’s the most conservative member of the Senate, and one of the twelve who identify themselves as Common Sense members. You aren’t likely to get him. But you need not to enrage him.

  “Our biggest worry, though, is Aggie Tucker of Texas. He’s cagey, and while he is disliked almost universally, he’s also feared because he understands the mood of the country almost better than anyone today. He was the first incumbent to recognize the power of the Common Sense movement. He was also a Supreme Court clerk to Justice Goldstein, Hoffman’s great antagonist on the Court. Senators don’t like Tucker. He can be as mean as a rattlesnake, and selfish. He is a leader of a new breed that puts faction above the Senate, even above the party. But other senators recognize he is smart and fearless and th
ey trust his instincts now because he is in tune with the populism that is sweeping the party. Tucker can change the dynamics. And he’s unpredictable.”

  Tucker was gracious but noncommittal during Madison’s visit and has remained that way since.

  “Among the Democrats, you have some fence mending to do.”

  The biggest surprise, and potential problem, is William Stevens, the senior Senate liberal. The old bull had scorched Nash over the nomination in a private meeting at the White House. The president, Stevens said, would unwittingly pull the country to the right, not help the Court be less polarized, by nominating an iconoclastic moderate.

  “I know what you’re trying to do, but it won’t work, Mr. President,” Stevens had said. “The way to change the Court is by making sure progressive arguments are made passionately, not trying to find someone with a new way of framing them.”

  Publicly, Stevens has kept quiet. But he did the president a courtesy in that private warning. If there are problems with this nomination, he had signaled, he will bail.

  “Okay, Rollie? Ready to move on?” Brooks asks.

  Madison nods.

  Rena and Brooks alternate their presentation—a way to keep a subject more alert.

  “When the hearings start, here’s what you can expect,” Rena begins. “About a third of the questions are going to be easy, basically softballs. Only a few will be serious questions, respectful and genuine. The rest will be nasty. Some will be aggressive. Others will be intellectual traps, asking your opinion of some seemingly benign statement by a legal scholar or a judge that they consider radical and dangerous. Over the course of several hours, this will amount to dozens of negative, even accusatory questions.”

  “The questioning has become more negative over the years,” Brooks adds. “Just to give you an idea, in 1955, Justice Harlan was asked just one negative question. Today, a third of the questions are negative. Some of them aren’t questions at all. They’re speeches.”

  Madison interrupts her, unable to control himself. “Yes, Ms. Brooks, I have the read the literature, too.”

  Rena gets up from the table and walks over to the small window overlooking Jefferson Place. A cold wave rolls down the back of his neck. He’s tired of the judge’s passive-aggressive behavior.

  He isn’t sure Madison and his friends have been entirely honest about their Berkeley past. And Rena doesn’t want this to go up in smoke because of lack of preparation on the part of him and his partner. They aren’t going to be done in by the man who hired him and the man they were hired to help—not without a fight. Enough.

  “Randi, Vic, may the judge and I have the room?”

  A look of surprise flashes in Brooks’s eyes and then passes. She nods and stands, and Vic follows her outside.

  Rena walks over and closes the door. He returns to the conference table in the center of the room and sits down on the tabletop in front of Madison. For many seconds, he says nothing.

  Then, almost in a whisper: “We’re not going to play this game anymore, Judge. Today is the last day. You will not treat the people trying to help you as if you are smarter than they are. You most especially will not treat the United States senators you meet that way. It’s rude. And you’re going to be in their house. They already know you’re smart, Judge. You’ve been nominated for the Supreme Court. Frankly, people with your kind of intelligence don’t impress them all that much. Most of the people who work for them are smarter than they are. U.S. senators are people who have spent their lives accomplishing more—acquiring more money, more power, more everything—than people smarter than they are. What they really want to know is if they like you.”

  “Mr. Rena, I don’t believe it is necessary to—”

  Before Madison finishes his sentence, Rena slams a fist down on the table. Madison stops.

  Rena speaks the next words so softly that Madison has to strain to hear them.

  “Judge, you only need to understand one thing today. And when I am done telling you this and you understand it, you can watch some video.”

  Rena takes a deep breath and speaks with an unconcealed fury, slowly, the way you would talk to a teenager in trouble.

  “The power and history of this city deserve your respect. Regardless of what you think of its current inhabitants. You may be the smartest person in the room. You may even be the smartest person you ever met. But you are not the smartest person who ever came to Washington.”

  Madison attempts to return Rena’s stare, but the judge is not as angry as the man standing over him. Rena leans closer. “As far as Washington is concerned, Judge, you are a rookie. Without a hit or even an at bat. And like any rookie, you will be hazed.”

  “Are you through?” Madison asks.

  “Nope. It’s a long way to confirmation. When you’re done here tonight, I recommend driving around Washington, not just the monuments, but also the lousy parts: You can see some of the worst poverty and deprivation in the world in Anacostia, next to the world’s most polluted river. Then the memorials; the Lincoln, Jefferson, and Roosevelt are the best. Give yourself a couple of hours. They’re especially beautiful at night.”

  Rena slides off the table and opens the door. “Because they don’t make those memorials for Supreme Court justices, sir. They’re not important enough.”

  “Show the man some goddamn TV,” Rena says as he passes Brooks in the hallway.

  “What was that about?” Brooks asks, appearing at his door a few minutes later. She looks more amused than angry.

  Rena, who is sitting on his sofa, puts his feet on the coffee table and sighs. “People always accommodate the most difficult person in the room. But there can only be one. And for the next month, it cannot, under any circumstances, be Roland Madison. So I have decided to occupy the space.”

  “Okay then,” she says, and without a word heads back to Madison.

  He opens the laptop on his desk. He checks the schedule his assistant O’Brien has set for him for the day. Not too bad. O’Brien has learned not to overbook him. He is looking through the software that tells them where they are on different client projects when his cell phone rings.

  “Peter, how are you?”

  Senator Llewellyn Burke, his former boss.

  “Senator, good morning.”

  “Been too long, too long.”

  Burke sounds tired. Rena can hear the eastern prep school influence sneak into his flat Michigan accent.

  “You need to come to dinner. I will talk to Evangeline,” he says. Evangeline Burke, if possible, has even more social skills than her husband.

  “I’d like that very much.”

  Llewellyn “Lewis” Burke, who was connected by blood to two different Michigan auto dynasties, had made a name for himself on his own in venture capital while still in his twenties, multiplying his family’s old millions into roughly a billion in new, mostly in technology. When he moved to politics—Burke’s father had been a senator briefly—he had made it clear he had no higher ambition than to serve Michigan in the Senate, and he derived much of his power in the body operating behind the scenes, guiding actions in surprising ways and doing favors in unexpected places. He operated with enormous freedom in part because he had accomplished what seemed today a political magic trick: He was a northern Republican with a secure seat.

  “How’s it going with this Madison nomination?”

  Burke isn’t on the Judiciary Committee. Why is he calling?

  “Not the easiest job I’ve had.”

  A soft chuckle and then: “Those visits up here went well, Peter. Congratulations.” He meant the trip to the Senate.

  “Thank you, Senator.”

  “But he needs to come visiting again. Some private chats. With senators in the opposition party, whom you think you might persuade. You understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Make sure he is as available as possible.”

  Rena considers the implications of Burke, a Republican who has no role on Judiciary, advising him
about this.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  “Good. That’s fine. I want to see you at dinner soon.”

  “Thank you, Senator.”

  Rena hangs up and imagines invisible hands all around him.

  Thirty-one

  Monday, June 1, 6:00 A.M.

  Bethesda, Maryland

  Gotta love a white van.

  Throw phone company magnets on the side and you could park the damn thing anywhere. With orange cones you don’t even need a parking place.

  One morning with Verizon magnets. Another from a gardening company. Magnetic signs. Best invention ever. Steal them and no one cares. Add a white van and you gotta a fleet of cars.

  He has been watching Martell now for two weeks.

  Learned one thing for sure. Guy’s life is a bore. Marriage over, getting fat, up at 6:00 every morning. Walks his big black dog at 7:00. Drives to work by eight. Martell eats lunch at one of three places within two blocks of his office. Goes home at 7:30. Eleven-and-a-half-hour workdays.

  He eats frozen dinners. Seen him carrying ’em from the car. Watches TV—thing is always on—then walks the dog, goes to bed.

  On Friday afternoons he leaves early and picks up his kids. Has them until Sunday around midday.

  Alan Kevin Martell, esquire, age forty-four.

  On the Internet they have his life story. In one paragraph.

  “Alan Martell is an attorney at the Office of Professional Responsibility at the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. Prior to moving to Washington, Alan was an Assistant U.S. Attorney for the California Northern District, in San Francisco, where he specialized in criminal trial work, and before that he had worked as an Assistant District Attorney for the City and County of San Francisco. At OPR, Alan makes use of his years as a federal prosecutor to investigate allegations of ethical and professional misconduct by federal agents and the nearly 10,000 attorneys employed by the Department of Justice. He has two children.”

  He doesn’t have to guess much where Martell will be. But there also aren’t many choices then about where to do him. Work. Home. Weekends with the kids.