Second Term - A Novel of America in the Last Days (The End of America Series Book 1) (9 page)

NINETEEN

White
House - Oval Office

 “Her people
all roar like young lions, they growl like lion cubs…one rumor comes this year,
another the next, rumors of violence in the land
and of ruler against
ruler.”

(Jeremiah
51:38, 46)

Since Hilde Calhoun’s
confirmation as Vice President, replacing the deceased Lawrence McAlister, the
President had virtually no contact with the Vice President. It wasn’t that
Hilde Calhoun didn’t try to spend some time with the President. It was just
that each request was rebuffed with varying explanations – he was still healing
from his ‘shooting’, he needed time with his family, he had to consult with his
staff, etc., etc. But no appointment. It was obvious to the Vice President that
she was being purposely shut out, probably she thought, by that Vivian Higgins,
or even the First Lady. Hilde’s inside the White House sources had divulged to
her that the two women closest to the President had strongly opposed her
selection as Vice President.

Hilde had an internal
engine. She relied on it often during the years she put up with Wilbur. It
helped her when she decided to run for the Senate. She thought it had failed
her, though, when she ran against the President in a bruising national primary
election, only to lose in what she saw as a humiliating defeat, even though
Wilbur had assured her that she would someday sit in the big chair in the Oval
Office. Ever since the President sent federal troops to the states her internal
engine had told her that something was drastically wrong. She raised her
objections with the President, as well as she could, but as the second person in
the west wing, the newest to building and more importantly, because she was
only there due to number one, she had to be careful how loud she objected. During
the campaign, after she had been dumped for Vice President and Larry McAlister
was the chosen candidate, she almost went public with an attack on the
President’s tactics to quell violence in the streets. When the President
declared martial law, her engine screamed that she needed to oppose the use of
federal troops, to stand against the use of American soldiers against American
citizens. But, reality set in, so she continued to restrict her opinions to
whispering frequently into Wilbur’s coma-silenced ears.

With her confirmation
by the U.S. Senate, though, everything changed. Hilde was now
the Vice-President.
She would be sworn in again for the full term on January 20
^th
, just
a few days away. She no longer served at the pleasure of the President, as she
had served when she was just a Cabinet officer. No matter what the President
thought, or wanted, or ordered, she could never be denied her job as
Vice
President
. Or so she believed.

With each passing day
Hilde became more concerned. It wasn’t just that she disagreed with her boss
and his use of the military in what were essentially civil issues. She had
become increasingly convinced that he was shoving the people of America into
launching a full blown revolution. She heard increasing numbers of stories from
around the country of violence, shootings and assaults on government buildings
and employees. Most went unreported in the mainstream media. Her well-developed
political instincts, developed over many years at the top levels of American
government, had convinced her that if she didn’t
remove
the President
from office, that armed mobs very likely might do so. America could have its
own American Spring, soon.

II.

 America
Debates the

Lawrence
McAlister

 Hate
Speech

and

 Hate
Weapons

Elimination
Bill

TWENTY

John
Madison Website Blog

If I could hit the
rewind button on my life, I would go back to October  and the speech I made to
the National Rifle Association chapter in Austin. The NRA campaign rally , of
course was well before the shootings in Dallas. I suggested in my little talk
that the President was planning to ‘take away our guns’, if he were to be
re-elected to a second term, and, of course, I urged that he be soundly
defeated, so that we could ‘keep our guns’. How could I have known? Needless to
say, after the shootings, the news clip of my Austin speech, or at least about
12 seconds of it, was a regular part of just about every frantic news special
on the so-called ‘Guns Against Government Conspiracy’, and there were many such
journalistic endeavors over the weeks after the Dallas shootings. As I said, I
might as well have painted a big red target on my chest, as I became the Texas
conservative that the liberals, the media, and particularly the Administration,
loved to hate in the gun and speech bill debate that ensued and accelerated
after the shootings. Needless to say, I’ve lost a lot of sleep.

That intensive
national debate didn’t take long after the election to start in earnest. From
immediately after the President’s re-election until 113-S.-1 was officially
introduced seven weeks later on January 1
^st
, there was no secret
that the returning Administration would use every power available to it to
regulate speech and ban guns in America. The only unknown was what the new law
would do to those Americans who didn’t want to give up their weapons of
protection. The hate speech provisions in the Bill received some critical
public comment, but did not seem to attract the same interest as the antigun
provision. Most of the media generally ignored the hate speech prohibition,
which surprised me, since it posed a threat to freedom of the press. But the
rumor was that the White House had quietly promised mainstream media CEOs that
the law would not be used on the media, just on supposed right wing radicals,
like me. 

Our various tea
party, patriot and gun rights organizations in Texas wasted no time after the
election in organizing ourselves to fight the adoption of the bill that had
been promised by the Administration to be its number one legislative priority
in the new Congress. We had known since the President’s hospital news
conference that it would be filed, and worse yet, we had sound reason to fear
that, unless we could arouse Americans to the looming danger of such a bill,
that it would likely be enacted into law, given the nation’s anti-gun climate
and the voting strength the President now enjoyed, again, in both Houses of
Congress. We didn’t know at first what the Administration’s bill would include.
The White House Press Secretary assured reporters days after their election
victory that the bill would “include carrots and sticks”.

We soon learned that
the ‘carrots’ part of the bill was a variation of the old ‘cash for clunkers’
program that caused many Americans to turn in their older automobiles in
exchange for cash payments from the federal government. Some federal genius
must have decided that if it worked for old cars, how about old guns? This gave
Americans very little credit for discerning the difference between wheels to
travel and a weapon to protect one’s life and family. We hoped that very few
gun-owning Americans would give up their defense against death and mayhem for
only five hundred dollars, or in the case of a rifle or shotgun, only seven
hundred dollars. But, if the bill that ended up passing included financial
incentives, given the depressed state of the economy and widespread
unemployment, we knew that only time would tell how many Americans out of work,
and in need of cash, would end up turning in their guns, motivated by the
payment.

What was not leaked
until the text of the bill was released was what the President’s Press
Secretary meant by ‘sticks’ to be included in the anti-gun bill to insure compliance?
A
felony
charge and conviction, with a
ten year prison term,
certainly
qualified as a ‘stick’, if not a whole bag of sticks. The New York Times
exulted that:

 Finally, America
will get over its sick love affair with    deadly weapons. Most thinking Americans,
particularly in crime-impacted cities, and the blue states on the     two
coasts, will step up, voluntarily do the right thing       and turn in their
guns. Undoubtedly, though the           turning over of guns will be motivated
in some parts of          the country only by the proposed time in prison, a
stiff         enough sentence that no American should willingly           want to
endure it, just to pack heat.

Once the nation had
learned what the bill actually included, the battle lines that had been forming
and loosely coalescing hardened into battle formation. The friends, supporters,
associates and sycophants of the Administration were, of course, united in
supporting 113 S.-1. No one was surprised by their intensity and fervor, at all
levels, in organizing their members, and their family members, to push the
Congress to pass the bill. Likewise, the conservative, tea party, patriot
associations, and many Christian organizations, organized to exert their
members and families’ maximum pressure on their members of Congress. No surprise
there, either. The frantic recruiting efforts by both sides, though, centered
on organizations and leaders of private associations that had not historically
been aligned on either side of the gun debate, or had no prior history of
interest in freedom of the press or speech issues.

Both sides
instinctively knew that the final outcome came down not to what Congress did,
but instead to what a handful of blue dog Democrats and liberal Republicans in
both Houses, a total of less than eighty Members, would do when the determining
votes were cast. The vote on the health care reform debate provided the outline
for victory for the White House, in that a bill strongly dis-favored by most
Americas, nevertheless, became the law of the land, even though by only seven
votes in the U.S. House of Representatives. Political pundits in the days after
the McAlister Bill was released speculated that the odds slightly favored the
passage of the bill, primarily because of the healthcare reform outcome.

Senator Blevins let
it be known soon after the bill was made public that he intended to put the
opponents of his bill on the defensive, announcing in his initial news
conference how he intended to do it. Seated in his wheelchair in the imposing
Senate Caucus Room on the 3
^rd
floor of the Russell Senate Office
Building, the only available room that was big enough to hold the media they
knew would come out to cover the unveiling of the Bill, the Senator fired the
first shot, and an impressively large shot it was. I’ve memorialized here the
important part of his formal statement announcing the Bill:

“Now that I’ve
covered in some detail the specific provisions of 113-S.-1, let’s talk a little
inside political baseball, so to speak. I’m more than mindful of the intensive
efforts by the gun lobby, and their misguided supporters, because my office has
been besieged by their dirty tricks, including robo-calls 24/7 to try and keep
my Senate office phones from functioning. But, my friends, this is not my first
legislative war. I will soon convene hearings of my Committee in this very same
august and historic room, which was the site of the investigation into the
sinking of the Titanic, the Army-McCarthy Hearings, as well as the Joe Valachi Mafia
Hearings, and the Watergate Hearings.

“We will hear from
several law enforcement officials across this country who were forced by the
gun-bullies to call out their forces to defend the American electoral process.
Let’s not forget that there would have been no need for the President to
declare martial law, if there weren’t all these guns out there. My goal as a
United States Senator, and Chairman of the Committee on the Judiciary, is to
insure that no future President ever has to again declare martial law, because,
there won’t be any firearms to defend against. The violence that has rocked our
nation in the weeks since the election is even further evidence of why we must
get rid of hate weapons and the hate speech uttered by the owners of those hate
weapons. We can’t afford either, any more, in America

“We will, of course,
hear from the many supporters of my Bill to make America gun free and safe.
But, just as importantly, I will be subpoenaing, not just inviting to testify, the
opponents of this sensible Bill. I want to make them come out in the open, out
from the shadows so to speak, and tell Americans, under the bright lights of
media coverage, how they could possibly oppose a Bill to make Americans safer
from gun violence. They’ve been sneaking around, lobbying their Senators and
Representatives behind closed doors, I want them out in the open, where we can
all hear what they have to say. Let’s look them in the eye and force these
gun-lusting, right wing, bullies to say in public what we know they’ve been whispering
privately. I’m looking forward to it, I’ll tell you that. The wounds that I
suffered in the ‘Guns Against Government Conspiracy’ will be worth it if we can
pass this Bill and stop all the shooting.”  

Senator Blevins’ news
conference hadn’t been over two minutes before my office phones in Tyler
started ringing off the hook. Somebody on Blevin’s staff had leaked that I was
among those being subpoenaed to testify in his Committee Hearings, starting in
ten days. Great. So, John, I asked myself when I got these calls, who ya’ gonna
call? An obvious answer - my friend and attorney, Chuck Webster, who as it
turned out, was more nervous than I was about this turn of events.