Chapter 14
The phone sat silently on the galley table for two hours.
Perhaps it was a waiting game, Rachael thought, with Maggie and Galahad testing each other to see who needed the other more. Maggie, for her part, didn't flinch. When the news broadcasts covering Meerkat's death were over, she simply switched off the television and stretched out on the salon bench.
There was probably something more critical they could have been doing, but nothing sprang suddenly into Rachael's head. Their next play was to interview Horus, that was clear, and Maggie was determined to hold the dryfoots hostage to wrangle an interview with the Senator.
Senator Hadian, Rachael smiled inwardly, what a scoop. If there was a more despicable public figure in politics, Rachael was unaware of him. Senator Hadian, author of the proposed 28th Amendment to the Constitution: a Federal ban on gay marriage. There was nothing Rachael would relish more than the idea of catching the Senator in the throngs of a sex scandal. The goddamned son of a bitch.
Rachael was salivating at the prospect, despite her professional ethics. She had to keep herself in check, restrain from starting a preemptive smear campaign before uncovering any real proof. All it would take is one call to the right reporter at the right supermarket tabloid and the floodgates would be open. There was every possibility that such a leak would never be traced back to Rachael, she just had to drop the pebble into the water, and the sharks would begin to circle...
Ah! She was mixing her metaphors, that was what sitting on such a time bomb like Senator Hadian and Meerkat was doing to her. But Rachael could resist, force down the urge to let the whole situation explode in the fat son of a bitch's face. It'd serve him right, he'd always been amongst the most outspoken opponents of the Raft. Shelter for cheats, felons, and perverts he'd called it on the floor of the Senate.
And however accurate that statement might be, it still got under Rachael's skin. Oh, to catch that self-righteous prick with his hand in the cookie jar...
Alright, Rachael knew she was biased. Perhaps it was Senator Hadian's success that offended her more than anything else. The truth was that there was a very real chance that his amendment might be ratified. And that possibility scared the life out of Rachael.
No, after more consideration, it was the Senator himself that offended Rachael. He was a slimy character, plain and simple.
When it had become obvious that there'd be no shoving his amendment through both the House and Senate with two-thirds majorities, he'd turned to a little known provision of the Constitution to pass amendments: the Constitutional Convention.
Normally, amendments to the Constitution began in the House or Senate, where two-thirds of each must vote for the amendment to pass. The amendment is then sent on to the states, where three-quarters of the state legislators must ratify the amendment.
But Article V of the Constitution contains another process by which an amendment to the Constitution might be ratified. It empowers the states to call for a Constitutional Convention. If two-thirds of the state legislatures agree, they may essentially do an end run around a do-nothing Congress. And with his amendment floundering at the Federal level, Senator Hadian had taken this populist cause.
It took some work, but as momentum built, he was able to convince thirty-five of the fifty-two state legislatures to call for a Constitutional Convention. Such a thing hadn't occurred since 1787 for the ratification of the Constitution itself. Political scholars were of differing opinions of exactly how a Convention of Amendment would operate – exactly how delegates would be seated – but Senator Hadian let none of the details dampen his enthusiasm. He called his Constitutional Convention, held conveniently in Wyoming, the only State at that time to successfully prosecute a gay couple for violating the state's same-sex marriage ban, and he proposed his amendment.
It was little more than a formality, really. The Senator had padded the delegate list with a small army of his political supporters. In fact, the actual convention was political theater at its best, Rachael had to admit. They televised the whole show. Speech after speech, it ran for a whole weekend. More than anything, the Constitutional Convention served as a political rally for the far right. After many years spent in a minority position in government, at both the Federal level and in state levels, the Constitutional Convention served as a much-needed shot in the arm to America's Conservative Movement.
Watching the convention, as any serious reporter had to do, made Rachael sick. The mix of small-minded bigotry and NIMBY populism was nauseating, but it delivered on its promise by swinging many political neophytes to the right-wing cause.
And it provided the perfect national stage for a character like Senator Hadian to strut upon.
He spared no straw men from his anger: the Raft, the gays, the liberals, the foreigners... all blamed for the decline of American greatness. Pass the 28th Amendment and America could once again take its place as the envy of the world, the home of free enterprise, the land of the brave, the home of the free.
It was the most disgusting sight Rachael had ever seen.
After the Convention, the proposed amendment made its way to the State legislatures for ratification. There, Senator Hadian's political theater collided with political reality. Three-fourths of the State legislatures would be required for ratification: thirty-nine. The first two-thirds, those that initially called for the Constitutional Convention, the flyover states and the Deep South, quickly affirmed their support. But the last four states turned out to be hard nuts to crack.
The Amendment was unpopular on the two coasts and Hawaii, states that had already legalized gay marriage or same-sex unions in some form. Above all, the Amendment was unpopular with the American people, with polls showing an almost two-to-one disgust at the idea of persecuting a minority group in such a fashion.
Puerto Rico finally succumbed, as did Illinois, for inexplicable reasons. After a year with the fate of the Amendment in doubt, the Senator was no closer to federally defining marriage than he had been before calling his Convention. He just needed two more states, two state legislatures to back his Amendment...
But the Left had entrenched itself, circling the wagons for one last hell-for-leather battle. There'd be no budging in New England, Democratic support there was far too strong. Senator Hadian decided to focus his attention on his home state of Washington, where west-of-the-mountain liberals were almost equally balanced by east-of-the mountain conservatives.
Senator Hadian, with his seat on the Finance Committee, brought in a lot of taxpayer dollars to subsidize agriculture in his home state. A defeat for his Amendment at home would be a personal humiliation as well as a political one. The Senator dug in his heels.
He cajoled, he bribed, he threatened, but he couldn't wring the result out of the Washington legislature that he demanded. Six months of trying and a dozen up or down votes and the Senator was at his wit's end. Washington was not going to go his way, even if it meant the loss of Federal dollars and the postponement of many needed infrastructure improvements. Rachael had never been so proud to call herself a Washingtonian as she had been the day the Senator's Amendment was shot down for the last time. She applauded, she cheered, she cried.
But the Senator wasn't totally beaten.
Article V, as well as provisioning for the proposal of a Constitutional Amendment via convention, also provisioned for the ratification of an Amendment by the same process.
This section of the law, surprisingly, was not untested. The 21st Amendment, and the repeal of the 18th Amendment, had been ratified in this fashion.
But could a Constitutional Ratification Convention be called after a State legislature had rejected an Amendment? The law was unclear, and that cloud of fear still hung over the whole affair as Rachael sat at Maggie's galley table waiting for the call from Special Agent Galahad.
Hadian's attempts in both Washington and Oregon to convene Ratification Conventions were before the US Supreme Court. Should the Court decide i
n favor of the Senator, then the 28th Amendment would pass, and gay marriage in the United States would be ruled illegal. But should the Court decide the opposite, or should the Senator befall some sort of political scandal...
Rachael had it all right in front of her: the means to put an end to the whole Amendment. She could do so much good with one small telephone call...
It was twisting her up inside, the anticipation. She wanted the Senator to be guilty so badly she could hardly see straight. It took every ounce of her willpower to maintain her professional ethics, not to jump the gun and let the facts find the story later. One call and it could all be over. No more 28th Amendment. No more Senator Hadian.
One call.
The Raft Page 25
