The February Crisis
An attack on the 2039 State of the Union Address leaves the US government leaderless and rudderless. An obscure cabinet secretary takes over the Presidency, extremists nearly control the depopulated Congress, and the Supreme Court is fully vacant. Yet America has more to fear than dysfunction in the face of terrorists and hostile nations. The greatest threats to the Union lie within, stemming from the nation’s succession laws—and from the very Constitution itself.
The decapitation strike is one of the more fantastical military strategies known to mankind. Formally, it is an attack designed to disrupt an enemy’s command and control structure. Informally, it refers to an assassination strike against said enemy’s top leadership. The concept doubtlessly dates back to prehistory, when some band of hunter-gatherers considered poisoning the elders of another band; yet it has very rarely been attempted. Why? Because for the longest time decapitation strikes just weren't feasible. For example, consider when John Wilkes Booth and his ilk targeted President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State Seward. As we all know, the conspirators only got one out of the three. Assassinating a lone leader was hard enough, and coordinating a number of simultaneous killings was really only possible if the plotters were already a powerful empire and the target was already under their control. At that point, though, it wasn’t really a decapitation strike anymore—usually it was just genocide.
This calculus briefly changed with the advent of nuclear weaponry. Suddenly, if most of a state’s ministers were in one city—something true for literally every country—then one well-placed bomb could end a war before it even began. Countries had to start worrying about how to maintain operational stability in the event that their capital went up in a mushroom cloud. Such continuity of governance plans did in fact exist before Hiroshima—people had been trying and failing to dynamite parliaments and cabinets for centuries—but these legacy plans were understandably fairly half-baked. The atomic era didn't spur all that much improvement, however. While it was all well and good to have a scheme giving power to the deputy undersecretary who just so happened to be away when everyone else died, it didn’t change the fact that said deputy undersecretary was probably not qualified to guide the nation through nuclear armageddon. Ultimately, focusing on preventing these scenarios from happening in the first place made more sense. This led to the development of second-strike tools such as the Soviet’s Dead Hand system, all of which combined to shift the conversation from “How will we survive?” to “How will the world survive?” With mutually assured destruction introduced into the equation, decapitation strikes again faded from view, and they all but vanished from a strategic standpoint after the end of the Cold War.
September 11th, 2001, which saw the brief activation of the United States’ Continuity of Operations plan, changed the situation ever so slightly. Decapitation strikes came back into the public eye, now with the newly minted gestalt image of an Arab (or Iranian or Afghan or Pakistani) man crashing a plane into the Capitol or bombing the White House. Of course, this new fear was far less realistic than the old one of nuclear annihilation; the logistical issues of decapitation strikes applied even more to Al Qaeda than they had to Booth. The terrorists might manage to pick off a random federal employee or two, but the only way the entire US government was at risk was if they were all gathered in the same room.
Oh, wait…
The risk posed by the State of the Union had long been the purview of conspiracy theorists, panic-mongers, armchair strategists, and writers of cheap thrillers. During my research, I counted at least twenty New York Times best-sellers, four movies, and three television series between 2015 and 2039 that used a decapitation strike during the address as a plot point. But in reality the Islamist extremists never took a crack at it, and neither did the many white nationalists who came after the January 6th Insurrection and during the subsequent Troubles. Even the most… optimistic of terrorists realized just how futile such an undertaking was: the State of the Union was just too heavily guarded.
A miniscule chance isn’t no chance, however. In 2039, someone finally made good on the attack vector.
That brings me to the tale I want to tell: how America’s continuity of government systems were exploited into bringing the country to the brink of a second civil war, and how a few brave souls were able to restore order.
The 2039 State of The Union Address kicked off at 21:00 EST on Tuesday, February 1st, but the attack came forty-three minutes later. It did not involve any bombs. Or crashing planes, for that matter. Or even gunfire. However, it was anything but subtle. At 21:43:36, the President began to slur his words, although nobody in the audience seemed to notice. Seventeen seconds later, one of the cameras loudly swiveled up towards the ceiling, the cameraman having fallen unconscious. Again, no reaction. After another nine seconds, at 21:44:02, the Speaker of the House slumped over in their chair. Finally, at 21:44:09, the President collapsed. A handful of Secret Service agents tried to make their way over, but their strength failed them after a step or two. In the course of a minute, five hundred and seventy-nine representatives; one hundred and five senators; the President; the Vice President; thirty-one Cabinet members; the majority of their deputies; the chiefs of staff of roughly two thirds of the aforementioned officials; all thirteen Supreme Court justices; twelve directors, generals, and admirals making up the majority of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Council; a smattering of diplomats; and several hundred more spouses, children, close relatives, and guests of honor had died, all on full display for the forty-four million Americans watching live, with no clear cause.
At first, nobody cared about the minor technicality of who was in charge. The question on everybody’s minds was simply what exactly had happened. After all, to the uninformed viewer it wasn’t even obvious that an attack had occurred. Might it have been some tragic accident? Perhaps there had been a freak carbon monoxide leak. At the other extreme, some of the nation’s more… uninspired grifters asserted that the nation had just witnessed a punishment straight from the Hand of God. Confusion reigned until 23:07, when the Capitol Police released a statement confirming what was, in retrospect, quite obvious: “unidentified airborne toxins” had been pumped into the House chamber, along with the rest of the Capitol building. Samples of this lethal miasma were being analyzed at various labs throughout the DMV region, and results were expected to start trickling in in a few hours.
Those tests ended up being unnecessary. The attackers themselves told the world what had happened.
For the three hours that elapsed between the Capitol Police’s statement and the discovery of the perpetrators by an intern at CNN, various talking heads across the media ecosystem chuntered on about whether an enemy state might have been responsible for the attack. America’s perennial enemies such as China, Russia, and Iran were all bandied about as possible culprits, nevermind that these states, being in possession of even the most basic sense of self-preservation, were all but gibbering with panic that the US might lash out and plunge the world into a nuclear apocalypse. Even honest-to-god terrorists shared this sentiment, as the leaders of everything from Al Qaeda to the Klan rushed to remote locales and underground bunkers. If even these madmen weren’t mad enough to try such a strike, then who was?
The video claiming responsibility for the attack had been posted at 21:00 even; it had been emailed to a CNN tip line at 21:45; and it was finally viewed by the aforementioned intern at 02:19. (The Algorithm had not seen fit to recommend the four-minute clip to a wider audience.) By 02:33, the video hit the airwaves. It primarily focused on providing details of the attack that no one but the true perpetrators could have known, such as the makeup of the gas that had been used. (It was a mixture of a novel organophosphate nerve agent and a gaseous anxiolytic.) More telling, however, was the channel on which the video had been posted, which belonged to a group known as the Fraternal Order of the New Dawn of the Coming End Times. FONDCET, for short.
Surprise, surprise: a cult had done it.
FONDCET had been founded in 2023 at the height of China’s cyberoffensive against Taiwan. Then, the digital war looked almost certain to touch off a true, kinetic war, something many feared would lead to a nuclear exchange between the US and the PRC. This atmosphere of dread gave birth to thousands of doomsday prepper organizations, of which FONDCET was one. When Xi called off his hackers, most of these groups promptly withered away, although a few found their way into the milieu of white ethnonationalist militias. FONDCET rejected both of these outcomes, instead taking on religious trappings to survive. They weren't all that successful, mind you: most potential recruits saw that its New Age, occultist mythos had been duct-taped on. However, the fifty-ish adherents that FONDCET did attract proved quite devout.
Things took a turn for the worse in 2026, when FONDCET’s leader, a master grifter well aware of his religion’s hollowness, died. The remaining members, now solely true believers, quickly developed the group’s beliefs to their logical conclusion. If FONDCET knew how to build a better, more durable society—a utopia, really—and all that stood in the way was the apocalypse, then wasn’t bringing about the end times a moral imperative? Of course, to most of the members this shaky reasoning was nothing more than self-affirmation for preexisting grievances; none of them were ruthless-but-delusional utilitarians. But that distinction has largely been lost to history. The psychoanalysis of terrorists is a niche field at best.
We still have yet to uncover how FONDCET obtained their mix of nerve agent and anesthesia. The former was discovered only a year before, published to nonexistent fanfare in an Indian chemistry journal; the latter had not been in production for almost a decade. The natural explanation is that the cultists took a page from Aum Shinrikyo and manufactured the chemicals independently, but no laboratory to do so was ever found. Additionally, many historians doubt that FONDCET had the expertise to produce such compounds. They were, ultimately, a bunch of preppers—a resourceful bunch, but hardly industrial chemists. The most plausible alternate theory points to a Vietnamese manufacturer with… tenuous ties to one of the cultists, but this business went bankrupt six months before the attack, and its records weren’t properly archived. Beyond this hypothesis lies nothing but conspiratorial drivel about communist corporations and Judeo-Muslim cabals.
We have a much better picture of how FONDCET infiltrated the Capitol. They used the oldest trick in the book: high-visibility vests, clip boards, and an air of belonging. In spite of some of the most stringent security protocols in the world, the infiltrators were waved through checkpoint after checkpoint as they struggled to carry a massive crate containing the toxic mixture of gasses. From there, it was trivial to physically access the ventilation system: the Capitol was undergoing renovations, and large sections of the complex had been stripped down to the (figurative) scaffolding. Bypassing the many filters and sensors throughout the HVAC system that should have locked down the Capitol upon detecting so much as a puff of smoke wasn't much harder. These safety mechanisms all communicated through an internal network which, while supposedly air-gapped, had a publicly accessible status page. FONDCET purchased a zero-day exploit for the software running the page to gain access to the entire network. They then silenced the alarms with little more than the click of a mouse.
This cascading series of failures has proved to be a source of confusion for the public. What was the plan if security didn’t let the cultists through? Surely such an otherwise sophisticated plan wouldn’t rely on pure luck. Where did FONDCET get the several tens of millions of dollars, a sum far larger than the total net worth of all of the cultists combined, that the zero-day cost? All of these questions, however, make the same mistake: they look for rationality and order where there almost certainly was none. We humans are just plain awful at accepting that bad things happen as a result of incompetence and bad luck, preferring instead to think up nefarious conspiracy theories. Clearly a bunch of radicals who trained using a video game couldn’t have pulled off 9/11; it must have been an inside job. Clearly a lone nutcase couldn’t have assassinated Kennedy; it had to have been the CIA. These delusions without fail require that their cabals and plots be led by (sometimes scores of) intelligent, competent people, and therein lies their problem. A person capable of meaningfully executing an insane, malicious conspiracy is precisely the type of person least likely to participate in one.
Not convinced? Consider the greatest mystery about the attacks. If FONDCET’s goal was to bring about the apocalypse, then why did they immediately out themselves? Surely the odds of nuclear war breaking out plummeted once everyone learned that a nation state wasn’t responsible. Armchair psychoanalysts don’t have any good answers. Some speculate the video was posted prematurely, nothing more than a common scheduling error; others think the video was posted by an overeager rogue member. A 2044 poll found a slim plurality (thirty-four percent) of Americans are sympathetic to the hypothesis that FONDCET mistakenly believed their attack would immediately trigger fail-deadly nuclear strikes. However, the simple truth, at least as best as I can tell, is that the terrorists hadn’t thought through the aftermath. Again, anyone inclined to do so wouldn’t have taken part in the first place.
To summarize: crazy cults are crazy. Who’da thunk it?
FONDCET’s tale came to an end on the evening of Friday, February 4th. They had been tracked back to their compound in Wyoming almost immediately; after an eighteen-hour standoff with a coalition of local law enforcement, the FBI, and the National Guard, the cultists pulled a Jonestown and committed mass suicide. Their demise triggered an evening of celebration across the country—FONDCET had just joined the likes of Osama Bin Laden and Brett Rudolphson. Nobody could get away with attacking America! Yet as the nation rejoiced, lawyers, constitutional scholars, staffers, and more were silently preparing legal briefs and media campaigns that would throw the US into chaos.
The coming storm revolved around the question of who should rightfully hold the Presidency (or, more precisely, the Acting Presidency), something both the average person and the average lawyer would have said was not and could not be in dispute. First in line was the Vice President, then the Speaker, then the President pro tempore, then the Cabinet secretaries. There was only one living person on that list, the designated survivor for the State of the Union, Secretary of Agriculture Susan Kim; thus she was the Acting President. Unfortunately, it wasn’t quite that simple. To see why, we’re going to need to suspend our story for a moment and put on our amateur constitutional lawyer hats. Don’t have one of those? Don’t worry! A lot of the legalese is actually quite accessible.
The Constitution sans amendments tells us almost nothing about Presidential succession, the sole statement being Article II, Section 1, Clause 6. That clause, however, merely tells us that the Vice President takes over when the Presidency is vacant and that Congress can pass a law to determine what happens if the Vice President is also unable to serve. So let’s look at what Congress created under this Clause 6 power: the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. The relative text was codified as of 2039 as 3 U.S.C. § 19, which consisted of five subsections. (Well, six, but the last one concerned pay.) Subsection (a) established the Speaker as the next in line after the Vice President and further mandated that they would have to resign “as Speaker and as Representative in Congress” in order to become Acting President. Subsection (b) put the President pro tempore after that, with an analogous resignation requirement. Subsection (c) stated how long the Acting Presidency would last. All well and good so far; nothing strange looking.
Subsection (d) was where things started to go wrong. It was divided into three paragraphs, the first of which established the order of the various Cabinet members in the line of succession, and the last of which established another resignation requirement. Paragraph (2), however, I must let speak for itself:
(2) An individual acting as President under this subsection shall continue so to do until the expiration of the then current Presidential term, but not after a qualified and prior-entitled individual is able to act, except that the removal of the disability of an individual higher on the list contained in paragraph (1) of this subsection or the ability to qualify on the part of an individual higher on such list shall not terminate his service.
Think about that second clause for a minute: “but not after a qualified and prior-entitled individual is able to act.” By that wording, if the Secretary of Agriculture were to take over only for the Secretary of the Interior to come along, then the latter would displace the former as Acting President.
You can kind of, sort of, blink-and-you’ll-miss-it see the reasoning behind this “bumping” provision: in theory, people higher in the line of succession should have been more qualified. However, the actual ordering established in paragraph (1) was largely based on departmental seniority. Even more bizarre was the second half of paragraph (2), which prevented bumping in the case of removal of disability. Since death and resignation were the only other ways in which someone further up might fail to qualify, and since those are usually permanent disqualifications, that would seem to make bumping utterly toothless, right?
Wrong. There was one non-obvious case where bumping could come into play—namely, when one of the higher-ranked positions in the line of succession was newly filled. Such a scenario would seem to bypass the exception clause. Now, the next subsection did put further restrictions on who could become Acting President, which I again will quote in full:
(e) Subsections (a), (b), and (d) of this section shall apply only to such officers as are eligible to the office of President under the Constitution. Subsection (d) of this section shall apply only to officers appointed, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, prior to the time of the death, resignation, removal from office, inability, or failure to qualify, of the President pro tempore, and only to officers not under impeachment by the House of Representatives at the time the powers and duties of the office of President devolve upon them.
In other words, the Cabinet seemingly couldn’t be a source of bumping. But what about the Speaker and President pro tempore? What if, say, there were only twenty-one surviving representatives, and they decided to appoint a new Speaker? Well, since a quorum in the House was a majority of members as opposed to seats, absolutely nothing could stop the rogue congressmen.
I imagine it’s quite obvious now where our story is going.
Historians generally consider America’s Troubles to have started either in 2021, with the January 6th Insurrection, or in 2023, with the formation of the domestic terror organization Patriots for American Heritage. These same historians place the end of the Troubles at 2035, with the drone strike that vaporized PfAH’s leader, Brett Rudolphson. Such strict delimitations are never quite accurate, however. By 2039, around fifty representatives still at least sympathized with the racial grievances that had driven Rudolphson’s campaign of violence. Only nine, however, publically extended their support to the late terrorist. These few rallied under the banner of the bluntly-named House Heritage Caucus. Since their idol’s death, the caucus members had set foot in Washington only to be sworn in, otherwise shunning the capital in protest.
We’re not sure precisely who told the Heritage Caucus about the bumping provision. It’s not exactly something even constitutional scholars spend a lot of time thinking about, and the Heritagers certainly possessed no one of such talent within their ranks. Or among their allies’ ranks, for that matter. But while the caucus was a shadow of a fragment of a shell of its former self—at their peak after the 2030 midterms, they fell just six seats shy of constituting a majority of the House; two years later, just after the House was uncapped, they carried two hundred and fifty-nine districts—what remained of the Heritagers’ support was still enough to include someone who knew of the exploit. The tip came in sometime on the 3rd, and by the 4th the caucus had hired actual (if not exactly reputable) experts to figure out how to best leverage this new tool. By the end of the day, their plan was set, and so the Heritagers set about executing one last hurrah for their imaginary Anglo-Christian nation-state.
On the morning of Saturday, February 5th, the Heritagers all but burst into the temporary House chamber, the events room of a nearby hotel. (The actual Capitol was still being decontaminated.) In tow was the Acting Clerk of the House, whom the rogue representatives had effectively abducted, along with two similarly coerced, innocent congressmen. It was the barest of quorums, and the Heritager majority would be gone within the hour as the other surviving representatives arrived, but that was irrelevant. It didn’t matter if the actual majority then selected a new Speaker—the first one would still be Acting President. The only possible hiccup was if the Heritager Speaker was replaced before they could be sworn in. To avoid this, a sympathetic judge was waiting just outside the room.
Strictly speaking, all of this adherence to decorum and procedure was unnecessary. After all, the Heritage Caucus was engaged in a naked power grab, something which almost by definition defies normal order. However, unlike other coups, the Heritagers lacked the backing of, well, any of the “power organs” of the state. Neither the military nor the intelligence community nor even the local police stood with the putschists. And while there were still plenty of white nationalist militias, those groups had been so eviscerated over the past few years that they were strategically almost negligible. No, if this takeover were to succeed, it needed at least a facsimile of legitimacy; otherwise the public would simply view the gambit as a rambling self-proclamation, no more worthy of news than the neighborhood vagrant’s weekly reminder that they’re the rightful heir to the British throne.
Public support wasn’t everything, of course: the Heritagers could always take the matter to the courts. However, by the time the matter was fully appealed, Acting President Kim would have been in office for weeks, maybe even months. No sane judge would attempt to remove a long-sitting President, let alone a majority of a panel of judges. While the Heritagers could ask for an expedited hearing to head off such a situation, that too would only be granted if they were seen as legitimate contenders. All told, not an appealing option as far as Plan B’s go.
The Heritage Caucus managed to plow through the necessary procedures in just under half an hour. They had to work quickly, for they had invited the media. While this publicity was another necessary prerequisite to making their coup appear right and proper, it also gave forewarning to the other surviving congressmen. Throughout the initial motions, those representatives that were quick to respond—which is to say, those not caught in traffic—trickled into the hotel. (Barring their entry was another surefire way to destroy the takeover’s legitimacy.) At 8:26, by a 9-8 vote, the Heritagers confirmed their new Speaker, who was sworn in as Acting President thirty seconds later.
The new pretender set off, along with the rest of the caucus, for the White House. If all went according to plan, Kim would be ushered out by confused staff. This removal would hopefully invert the legal calculus. The former Agriculture Secretary had hardly stood out over the past few days; that honor went to the FBI and the Wyoming National Guard. While any legal case she might bring would likely be expedited, Kim’s lack of support combined with her not being the one physically in the Oval Office would hopefully level the playing field enough that the putschists’ lawyers could finish the job. All the Heritagers had to do was get there. It was so close…
Then everything fell apart: the Secret Service denied the putschists entry.
The Heritagers were on the right track regarding perceived legitimacy. The American people had not yet accepted Kim as the Commander in Chief. Everyone understood well enough that she was legally (Acting) President, but to the common man she was still the nation’s chief farmer—if the common man even knew who she was. This situation almost certainly presented an opening for someone to seize power. However, the bumping provision was simply too obscure. It alone would never be enough to legitimize an usurper, something the Heritage Caucus was only dimly aware of. To succeed, they needed their new Speaker to be someone America could rally around. Well qualified, not too extreme, and likable.
Instead, they chose Declan Rudolphson, Brett Rudolphson’s younger brother.
Rudolphson the Younger represented West Virginia’s 2nd District. He was, in fact, the most moderate Heritager, having never proposed overturning Brown, tying citizenship to race, removing the barrier between church and state, nor any of the other chunks of regressive bile his colleagues so loved to spew. His proposals were more in line with the thinly obfuscated racism that had been so popular from the 70s to the 10s. In some ways, primarily on environmental issues, Rudolphson was even a genuine moderate. He was also qualified for the Presidency. A graduate of Harvard with a degree in international relations, Rudolphson had (briefly) served as National Security Advisor in 2025. (He was forced out after his relation to Rudolphson the Elder became public knowledge.) From there, he became the House Minority Whip for the 122nd Congress, the last time the Heritage Caucus could reasonably have been said to be a major faction. In short, one could very plausibly make a case that Rudolphson might have been presidential material.
But he was still the brother of America’s most prolific domestic terrorist. The public was never going to go for that.
Having been embarrassed, Rudolphson and his posse retreated to the unoccupied Naval Observatory. There, the putschists announced that they would file suit in the District Court of DC to force Kim out. Plan B, in other words. Publically, they claimed they had a fair chance. One Heritager boisterously said that the only way they would lose was if either their election of Rudolphson as Speaker was invalid or the Succession Act itself was unconstitutional, nevermind that such an analysis was almost tautologically true. Privately, however, the caucus was despondent. They needed their case to be heard on an expedited schedule: every day that passed brought Kim closer to being viewed as legitimate. Unfortunately, waiting in the snow for ten minutes at the gates of the White only to be… shooed away by a lone, exasperated, and cloyingly patronizing Secret Service agent tended to not be conducive to getting the court’s attention.
That should have been the end of the crisis. The courts ran down the clock, practicality won out, and Kim served out the remainder of her term as Acting President. Sometime therein, the newly replenished Congress passed a new succession act without a bumping provision, and all was well for another few decades. Except nothing of the sort happened—otherwise I would have picked a different crisis to write about.
As it turned out, the judges of the D.D.C. and the D.C.Cir.—the district and appellate courts, respectively—were bolder than anyone had realized, undaunted by the prospect of having to choose the next (Acting) President. After meeting for the better part of the 5th, they published a letter outlining their intentions, in which they quite bluntly stated, “…with every passing day, it will become more challenging to find a practical remedy.” Consequently, the judges set out an expedited schedule that would see the suit heard and then appealed over the course of four days. Rudolphson’s lawsuit hadn't even been filed, and the letter had been very carefully phrased as the “unofficial, personal opinions” of the writers, but their message was clear. No outside circumstances would affect their judgment.
The letter from the DC judges immediately generated controversy. Pundits began chuntering on about whether it meant that the courts supported Rudolphson. (They did not.) Others speculated that the letter amounted to a judicial coup. (It wasn’t.) A few even speculated that the letter would lead to a mistrial on account of “biasing the jury.” (Such trials had no jury.) Still, the announcement was highly unusual, offering the Heritagers a glimmer of hope that their putsch was not yet dead. Mind you, it was a faint glimmer: not one of the DC judges supported the white nationalists, either publicly or privately. If Kim gave even a semi-coherent defense, a third of the D.C.Cir. would not even bother listening to Rudolphson. (Speculating wildly, I suspect this faction was rather reluctant to sign the scheduling letter.) Regardless, a chance was a chance.
Acting President Kim publicly revealed her defense strategy at dawn on the 6th. To understand it, we’re going to need to crack out the Constitution again. In particular, we need to look at the full text of Article II, Section 1, Clause 6:
In Case of the Removal of the President from Office, or of his Death, Resignation, or Inability to discharge the Powers and Duties of the said Office, the Same shall devolve on the Vice President, and the Congress may by Law provide for the Case of Removal, Death, Resignation or Inability, both of the President and Vice President, declaring what Officer shall then act as President, and such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.
All things said, this was one of the more… awful clauses in the Constitution, largely because of its vagueness. Historically, people have taken issue with the part saying that “the Powers and Duties… shall devolve on the Vice President,” which doesn’t explicitly make the Vice President the new President. Experts have long argued over whether this was an oversight on the Founders’ part, and the uncertainty caused a minor crisis when President Harrison died a month after being elected. Vice President Tyler was of the opinion that he should become President, but the Cabinet declared him Acting President. Given that all the textbooks call Tyler “President,” I’m sure you can guess who won that fight. While Tyler’s ascension created a precedent, however, the matter didn't truly get resolved until 1967, when the Twenty-fifth Amendment finally clarified when the Vice President becomes Acting President versus Actual President.
Ah, but I’m getting a bit sidetracked.
There were two specific phrases in Clause 6 that formed the backbone of Kim’s defense. Her first argument centered around “…such Officer shall act accordingly, until the Disability be removed, or a President shall be elected.” I’d love to give some pithy summary, but the text here, at least as written, is fairly simple and clear: no changing the Acting President. Bumping was thus unconstitutional under a strict textual reading.
This point wasn’t quite the legal slam dunk it seemed. A lot of constitutional law, regardless of country, has to do with deciphering intent just as much as raw word choice. Take the Second Amendment: to this day we have no idea what level of regulation the Founding Fathers intended. So too was the end of Clause 6 unclear. On the one hand, it may have meant exactly what it said; on the other, it may have been a sloppily worded attempt to prevent Congress from being able to replace the Acting President. Given that Madison and company were quite worried about the executive and the legislature being independent, the latter interpretation might even make more sense. (Of course, Rudolphson’s ascension was the result of the House deciding that they wanted a new executive, so an appeal to Originalism would still be dubious at best.)
Kim’s next line of defense focused on the immediately preceding phrase “declaring what Officer shall then act as President.” At first glance, that might seem to be perfectly clear and inoffensive; however, the ambiguity becomes glaringly obvious after examining the segment of Article 2, Section 2, Clause 2 known as the Appointments Clause:
… [the President] shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls, Judges of the supreme Court, and all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law: but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments.
As the name implies, this clause governed Cabinet appointments. That’s not the important part, though—note that same, big, capitalized “Officer,” just like in Clause 6.
To the Founding Fathers, “Officer” was a term of art, not a colloquial catchall for any government official. It referred to any person to whom the head of state—which is to say, the President—had delegated a portion of the sovereign authority of the United States. So yes, judges and Cabinet secretaries were included: the former wielded the power to decide lawsuits; the latter the entirety of an executive department. All military officers were also Officers of the United States, as they commanded a portion of the military. Your local mailman, however, was not, because no event, no matter how cataclysmic, could lead to his controlling some modicum of the government’s power. The same applied to the President’s Chief of Staff. Their influence stemmed entirely from having the President’s ear rather than from holding any executive authority. Finally, as you may have guessed by now, neither the Speaker of the House nor the President pro tempore were officers under the Appointments Clause. They were legislative roles whose formal power came purely as chief parliamentarians.
To get around this argument, Rudolphson would have to argue that Clause 6 used “Officer” in the colloquial sense of the word. There was… some evidence to support this, as the original Presidential Succession Act of 1792 had included the Speaker and the President pro tempore in the line of succession. However, that act also included dubious provisions for holding special presidential elections—not exactly good company to be in. Moreover, some of the Framers apparently opposed the 1792 act on the grounds that they hadn’t intended for the parliamentarians to be eligible. Strictly speaking, Rudolphson could also ask to overturn centuries of legal precedent by redefining “Officer of the United States” to include legislative officers, but only the greatest of judicial hacks would buy that.
All told, the putschists looked to have little chance of success. They would need a miracle to convince a majority of the D.C.Cir.
Rudolphson didn’t get one. On Thursday, February 10th, in an en banc review, the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit ruled 10-1 in favor of Acting President Kim, the lone dissent being a technicality. Unfortunately for America, this decision came too late to stop the crisis.
Just as Rudolphson v. Kim was being filed, another case had been placed on the docket: Cooper v. Anderson. The titular Cooper was a mere private citizen; he filed the suit in South Dakota’s state court system. He claimed that the governor, the aforementioned Anderson, had to “recognize” Rudolphson as the sole and rightful President. I won’t go into the legal specifics because, quite frankly, they were utter nonsense. If Rudolpson was a pure (if lopsided) battle of constitutional law, Cooper was nothing but hackery, argued by hacks and decided by hacks. South Dakota had been a hotspot during the Troubles, serving as a common base of operations for many white nationalist militias; this legacy could still be seen in the state and local government. Anderson was a supposedly reformed supporter of the elder Rudolphson, and the State Supreme Court had been packed in 2032 with less repentant partisans. These fiends rushed Cooper through the entire legal process in just two days, with Anderson’s “defense” often not even appearing. By the time the D.C.Cir. made their ruling, South Dakota had already thrown their lot in with the Heritagers.
A part of me wonders if the DC Circuit made the right call in Rudolphson. Not the correct call, mind you—I defer to their legal wisdom—but the right one. By the time they passed judgment on the case, almost twenty hours had elapsed since South Dakota had announced their alignment with the now-ex-Speaker. The no-longer-reformed Governor Anderson was shouting from the rooftops that she would rather be arrested than recognize Kim. The D.C.Cir.’s ruling thus amounted to a guarantee that a conflict of some form would arise. Maybe the crisis would be resolved out of the public eye, with South Dakotan officials being bribed or blackmailed into relenting; or maybe it would end with tanks rolling through Pierre. Either way, the resolution would be brought about by extralegal means. Well, I suppose from Kim’s perspective the latter option would amount to her legally suppressing a rebellion. Perhaps “non-normative” is a better descriptor.
In the judges' defense, the alternative wasn’t exactly great either. Ruling in Rudolphson’s favor would have elevated one of the most divisive men in America to the Presidency. His merely holding the office risked reigniting the Troubles. Additionally, other states might have followed in South Dakota’s footsteps, but in favor of Kim. Those that did so were likely to be somewhat more… impactful than the Mount Rushmore State—imagine tanks rolling through Sacramento rather than Pierre. But these nightmare scenarios were by no means certainties. It was, while nowhere near probable, at least plausible that events would pan out peacefully. Even in the elder Rudolphson’s strongholds, almost nobody wanted a return to PfAH’s reign of terror. The special elections to the House would likely break overwhelmingly against Rudolphson the Younger, and the Senate wouldn’t be much more sympathetic. The rest of the Acting President’s term would then have been nothing more than an extended lame duck session, if he didn’t end up impeached.
Or maybe he would have invoked the Insurrection Act and triggered a civil war.
I don’t want to put any blame on the D.C.Cir. for the events that followed their ruling. The fault lies entirely on the people who orchestrated Cooper, South Dakota’s executive and judiciary. They were the ones who escalated the crisis to the brink of civil war. Moreover, I’m sure the judges of the Court of Appeals fully considered the realpolitik consequences of their decision. They likely felt that the mere possibility of de-escalation wasn’t worth the risks created by handing Rudolphson the keys to the Oval Office. Still, that doesn’t change the fact that, come Friday the 11th, the sun rose on an America that had two Presidents.
Continuity of Governance had failed; it had taken just a week and a half.
Over the course of the 11th, the situation grew more precarious. The Governor of West Virginia unilaterally threw his state behind Rudolphson, as did the Governor of Montana, although Montana’s legislature revolted at this prospect and immediately began drafting articles of impeachment. Cooper-like lawsuits, having previously been dismissed due to lack of standing, legal merit, and logical coherence, were suddenly resurrected in Mississippi, Nebraska, Utah, and Wisconsin. While the viability of these legal zombies was questionable at best, the media, gripped by hysteria, treated the suits as done deals.
It’s always in vogue to blame the media as being not up to the task of informing the public. Unfortunately, while the press was doing passably on the 11th, the information ecosystem as a whole was not. Trust in the news had been not-so-slowly and steadily ebbing since Rudolphson the Elder’s demise, leading to the media being dominated by a fractured menagerie of… well, the contemporary term was “current events interpreters,” but that does not do their ilk justice. They were entertainers who falsely draped themselves in the trappings of journalism and punditry while simultaneously emphasizing their lack of credentials in any field even tangentially related to the news. Some of them were merely chuntering imbeciles; most were feckless grifters. All combined, they spewed misinformation and even disinformation at a rate to rival even the early days of the Troubles. This situation manifested on the 11th in the form of the narrative of a nation tearing itself apart. Rudolphson was too extreme, Kim was too weak, yet everyone had to choose.
Perhaps if more people had been paying attention to the actual news, the nation might have seen the situation for what it was. While the trendlines were not great, it was hardly the second coming of 1861—or even 1877, for that matter. The three states that were backing Rudolphson were tiny, and the fraction of people within them that supported the rebellion was smaller still. Flash polling put the support level in South Dakota at just 21%. Nationally, support for overturning Rudolphson stood at just 13%. And in the states with the Cooper zombies, vast protests materialized from thin air, surrounding capitol complexes, court houses, and even judges’ private residences. If worse came to worst, it was less that tanks would have to roll through Pierre, Charleston, and Helena and more that a lone tank would have to do a quick drive by.
Unfortunately for America, amongst the ranks of the millions caught up in the narrative of despair was one of the most powerful men in the country: the new Secretary of State.
On the morning of Wednesday the 2nd, less than twelve hours after the attack, Acting President Kim submitted four nominations to the depleted Senate. They were for the positions of Secretary of Homeland Security, Attorney General, Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of State. For the former two, she managed to browbeat previous occupants of the positions out of retirement. For the latter two, however, negotiations took too long for her liking, and she instead nominated the Deputy—and thus Acting—Secretaries. Her goal here had been merely to replenish the line of succession, a task which she did not wish to delay with a lengthy vetting process. The sole surviving senator, one Watkins Frost of Texas, swiftly confirmed these appointments, although after the events of the 5th the man cravenly refused to entertain further nominees until the matter of the Acting Presidency was resolved.
With that, it’s time to put our lawyer hats back on. Remember how we concluded that new Cabinet secretaries couldn’t bump an Acting President? That was a bit of an oversimplification. Recall that the eligibility requirement was that the new secretary be “appointed, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, prior to” the succession crisis kicking off. Well, Kim had just elevated the Deputy SoS—which is indeed a Senate-confirmed position.
The new Secretary of State, Ivan Barrueco, had a distinguished record of service: he had received three medals of honor for his actions in the Second Korean War, earning the adoration of both the American and South Korean publics. That had in turn led to a stint as the Ambassador to Korea, serving for six years before becoming Deputy Secretary of State. Now, I don’t want to blindly conflate military service, let alone public service, with a true sense of patriotic duty. However, the two are sufficiently correlated that it should not come as a surprise that, even though Barrueco had known about his bumping status since the 5th, he had chosen not to pursue his claim to the Acting Presidency for fear of further escalating the crisis. Moreover, he clearly did understand the situation on the ground: following Montana and West Virginia’s defection, he put out a press statement noting the lack of popular support for Rudolphson’s bid.
By the end of the 11th, however, Secretary Barrueco’s confidence in Kim was wavering. After a day of being surrounded by people who thought the Union was falling apart, he began to wonder whether the talking heads who blathered on about Kim being weak were right. After all, while three states had effectively rebelled, the disputed Commander in Chief seemed to still believe the crisis could be solved in the courts. She wasn’t considering invoking the Insurrection Act, nor was she even keeping tabs on the National Guard, a threat vector she could shut down with a simple order. Instead, she merely filed suit after suit demanding the rogue states recognize her. Of course, the defendants had already announced that the federal judges could pound sand, so that approach looked less than ideal.
On the morning of the 12th, the Montana House held an “extraordinary” Saturday session to vote to impeach their governor. In the middle of a quorum call, however, a gang of Rudolphson supporters barged past security into a viewing gallery and opened fire on the legislators. Nobody was injured, for the assassins had unloaded into a pane of bulletproof glass, and the vote passed without incident an hour later. Nevertheless, the failed insurrection greatly disturbed Barrueco. Kim in contrast didn’t even acknowledge the attack, neither to the public nor to her Cabinet. This proved to be the last straw for the Secretary: he wasn’t about to let his country shamble into a new civil war. If Kim wasn’t up to the job, then maybe he was.
Barrueco had a better idea than the Heritagers of what was involved in staging a coup. Namely, it was about seizing control of the portions of the state capable of wielding hard power, such as the police and the intelligence apparatus—the “power organs,” as I called them before. In this case, as he believed that he needed to oust Kim quickly, that meant getting the military onboard. Since the Chain of Command was intact, he would need the support of Secretary of Defense Nina Ozoemena. Once her support was secured, it would be simple enough to convince the other Cabinet members, and from there they could confront Kim and demand her resignation. As there was no Speaker—after Rudolphson had resigned as per the Succession Act, the remaining representatives had left the position empty—or President pro tempore, that would award the position to Barrueco, no bumping required. No violence for that matter either; just the threat.
Negotiations with Secretary Ozoemena briefly showed promise: the two agreed that the nation’s chief farmer wasn’t rising to the occasion. However, a fundamental difference in strategy soon arose: Barrueco refused to even consider actually using force. Seize power? That was the whole idea. Seize the means of power? Only necessary. But to actually use those means? That was a bridge too far. As the Secretary of State saw things, the moment his coup became visible to the public, any legitimacy his regime might have would be destroyed. Sure, Rudolphson was vile, an opportunistic white nationalist, and the D.C.Cir. had rejected his claim, but he looked a good deal better than having the military install someone. People and states would flock to the putschist Speaker; a civil war would be a certainty, exactly what Barrueco was trying to avoid.
Ozoemena disagreed on several levels. For one, she felt that the mere threat of violence wouldn’t sway Kim. For all that her approach was misguided, the former Secretary of Agriculture was fearless, willing to see her duty through until death if necessary. There was simply no way to remove her without at the very least arresting her. Moreover, Ozoemena did not believe that the headline “Kim deposed by Barrueco, military” was all that problematic. While there would certainly be some segment of the population that would be opposed to a coup, the Secretary of Defense felt that these people already viewed Rudolphson as having attempted the same. (I am in this camp, hence my referring to the Heritagers’ gambit as a putsch.) In contrast, Barrueco was known to the nation as a war hero, even still a decade after Korea. The late President had sustained criticism after only making him Deputy Secretary, and early polling put the man up by double-digits over his nearest rivals in the 2040 Presidential Race. In short, he was beloved—or at least as close as a politician could come. Maybe there would be a problem if Kim had a greater base of support, but the narrative had taken root that she was some country bumpkin hopelessly in over her head.
(Incidentally, Kim had never worked a day on a farm. Born in the rural farming town of Los Angeles, she had run a venture capital firm specializing in high-tech, renewable farming startups prior to being tapped for the Cabinet. Quite the bumpkin.)
Ultimately, neither Secretary would budge, and Ozoemena stormed out of the meeting, leaving Barrueco in a bind. Now how would he get the rest of the Cabinet onboard? Ozoemena would have been the domino to knock the others down, and nobody else had quite the same… well, impact. He could do an end-run around her and try to win over various generals and admirals, but he frankly did not know them well enough to guess how they would respond. The Department of Homeland Security controlled the Coast Guard and the Secret Service, but the new-old Secretary was a curmudgeonly institutionalist. The alternatives only got worse from there.
Barrueco’s bloodless coup lay dead before it had even begun. He needed to rethink his approach to removing Kim from the ground up. He and his most trusted staff spent what was left of the 12th wargaming out other schemes, but the result was always the same. So long as he drew the line at violence, Kim would remain. Then, at half-past-three in the morning—03:38 specifically, according to his memoir—the solution presented itself. Maybe he could take a page from Rudolphson. Optics would save the day. Optics and frivolous lawsuits.
Our story is overflowing with antagonists. FONDCET, Rudolphson, the Heritage Caucus, the hacks behind Cooper, to name a few. Some pedants among you might call them villain protagonists instead, but I feel that delves too far into the realm of literary theory. Either way, I suspect I’ll get no pushback characterizing this lot as regular, old villains. Barrueco, in my humble opinion, was no villain. He wanted only what was best for his country, and he took great pains to achieve this goal nonviolently. However, the Secretary tragically belongs with the aforementioned evildoers as an antagonist. Why? Because had he not acted, the crisis would have resolved itself in a few short days.
While a handful of wingnuts were ready to fight on Rudolphson’s behalf, the man himself was not. He saw quite clearly that he lacked a winning coalition. Even worse, what leverage he did have was mercurial at best. The militiamen that were crawling out of their bunkers to support him weren’t under his control—or anyone’s control, for that matter—and seemed likely to waste their strength on bloody and flashy but strategically pointless acts of terror. They were useless as leverage in negotiations, for they were a force of nature barreling towards the country. Nothing short of Rudolphson’s absolute victory would satisfy them. Thus, not wanting the crisis to end with his facing a firing squad, on Saturday the 12th Rudolphson reached out to the White House to discuss a graceful surrender.
Acting President Kim had been waiting for this moment since the verdict on Rudolphson had been handed down. Her refusal to take any action against either the rebellious states or against Rudolphson personally had, in fact, been strategic. As she saw things, a few days of media slander were well worth it if she could end the crisis peacefully. Of course, there was still the issue of the white nationalist militias, but Kim believed that they only made Rudolphson’s cooperation all the more necessary. Suppressing the terrorists was sure to be a messy, bloody task, to say nothing of the fact that, if the governor of South Dakota was to be believed, the occupation of Pierre was on the horizon. While it wasn’t clear whether Rudolphson’s voluntary surrender would even slightly blunt the edge of the coming storm, it seemed a chance worth taking. Kim needed every break she could get if she was going to govern effectively for the next two years.
The Acting President kept her master plan close to her chest. Any leak would give the more obdurate insurrectionists time to entrench themselves, or even to disrupt potential negotiations. Rudolphson couldn’t step aside if the other Heritagers’ Praetorian militiamen spirited him away to a hidden compound in rural Idaho. Unfortunately, Kim was perhaps too paranoid. Many of her advisors, chief among them our friends Barrueco and Ozoemena, had been advocating for a more aggressive approach; Kim feared that this hawkish faction would compromise any dialogue just to ensure that the traitors could be made examples of. Thus, when Rudolphson’s outreach came, she told only her Secretary of Homeland Security, the sole member of the Cabinet whom she trusted on the matter.
Over the course of the 12th, negotiators made slow but steady progress. Proposals ranged from Rudolphson becoming Vice President to him going into exile in South America. By the morning of the 13th, they began to converge on a deal where he would resign from his false Acting Presidency, have Kim re-sworn in with his blessing, denounce the rogue states, and then withdraw from the public eye. There were still plenty of details to be worked out, such as the fate of the other Heritagers, but the two felt moderately confident that they would have something by Tuesday.
Then Barrueco metaphorically barged in and flipped the table over.
Barrueco’s volley of lawsuits began in the District Court of DC, where he filed effectively a clone of Rudolphson. This was not, strictly speaking, frivolous, as the previous case had been resolved on the grounds of the now-irrelevant definition of “Officer”; the Clause 6 defense had gone untouched. Granted, it was hard to see the Secretary winning over more than an extra judge or two, but it at least had some merit.
What didn’t have merit were the hundred-plus other suits that followed. In each and every district court a lawsuit was filed against the corresponding state, which ran headfirst into 11th Amendment issues, jurisdiction issues, standing issues, and basic Constitutional issues, such as there being no mechanism for an individual state to recognize a President. Similar suits were filed against the governors, which really only solved the 11th Amendment problem. Any judge worth their salt would have dismissed these cases with prejudice, but therein lay the beauty of Barrueco’s plan: he didn’t care. These suits were not meant to effect legal change; they were a clarion call for supporters in the fight for the Presidency, existing only to create the illusion that the Secretary was a serious, legitimate claimant. Once that was established, his popularity and Kim’s perceived weakness would do the rest of the work, or so he hoped. Barrueco knew for a fact that some governors shared his views on the crisis; they would hopefully join of their own accord. This would lend more legitimacy to his claim, leading to an increase in public support for a Barrueco caretaker government, which would in turn pressure other governors to cast their lot in with the Secretary, creating a feedback loop. Once enough states were behind him, he would try again with his original bloodless coup.
As far as plans go, this one wasn’t… terrible. The initial blitz was fairly sound, yielding its first dividend before noon, in the form of Hawaii. The islands’ governor took a cue from West Virginia’s and made a unilateral declaration. Barrueco’s home state of New Mexico followed suit later in the day. Monday morning saw neighboring Arizona join the coalition, with the state legislature leading the way for a change, passing a joint resolution that the governor quickly affirmed. Concurrently, North Carolina shepherded a Cooper-like through in just under eight hours, throwing their weight behind the Secretary as well.
Unfortunately, this coalition had a fatal flaw. Namely, it had grown too quickly. Any plan that involves a self-perpetuating optics loop has an element of “momentum.” Hawaii to New Mexico to Arizona to North Carolina was a fairly steady, increasing trajectory. But while the first three weren’t exactly large states, North Carolina was. To keep that trend up, what needed to follow was either a surge of smaller states or one of the Big Four—New York, Florida, Texas, and California. Maybe Illinois or Pennsylvania could bridge the gap, but only for a day or two. Anything else would create the appearance of his push fizzling out. So what did Tuesday the 15th bring for the Secretary?
Nevada and Puerto Rico. fizzle…
Even worse for Barrueco, the 15th brought about the start of a counter-movement against his bid. Wyoming passed a resolution, just as Arizona had, reaffirming their support for “the rule of law,” which was to say, Kim. By the end of the day, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut had joined in. Strictly speaking, these declarations changed little; states were presumed to be behind Kim until they declared otherwise. However, they well and truly crushed any momentum the Secretary of State had left. Mind you, that did not equate to Kim having momentum. The current events interpreters, that feckless bunch, almost instantaneously started referring to states not explicitly behind one of the contenders as “unaligned.” All of the sudden, most of the media was chuntering on about how forty-one states—Montana had succeeded in impeaching their governor, becoming unaligned, while Georgia soon threw in for Barrueco—were wildcards up for grabs. The end result of the Secretary’s play thus looked to be ironically the opposite of what he had set out to do. The United States was even farther from having a single, publicly accepted Acting President than they had been before.
This is probably a good place to mention exactly how Barrueco received his medals of honor. Then an infantry captain, he had received a dubious tip that the undersupplied, starving, and otherwise neutralized North Korean unit that he was squaring off with was massacring local villages. Naturally, he sent his various platoons out to investigate. Without holding any in reserve. And without air support. Or artillery cover. Also, they were too far apart to support one another. Each time one of his platoons came under attack, Barrueco personally rushed in to reinforce, bringing his half-dozen staff along. Heroic for sure, but you can see why he was awarded an ambassadorship that, while high profile, was typically ceremonial.
While states were tossing around proclamations and declarations and resolutions like there was no tomorrow, these had very little effect on anything other than public sentiment. After Rudolphson, just about every organ of the federal government was under Kim’s control. That didn’t mean any of them were happy about the situation, but they acknowledged the authority of the D.C.Cir. Ultimately, Barrueco and Ozoemena were the only Cabinet members who wished to depose the Acting President, and the latter of the two would only serve as an accessory to the deed. There was a brief period of confusion immediately after the former’s lawsuit blitz as to where the State Department would land, but Barrueco’s second in command, the Deputy Secretary of State for Management and Resources and the second Acting Secretary of State in just as many weeks, showed up for Kim’s next Cabinet meeting unfazed by her boss’s mutiny. There was more grumbling among lower-level federal employees, typified by an infamous but apocryphal report that the Secret Service refused an order to arrest Barrueco, who had commandeered the historic Octagon House; but actual, verifiable insubordination was negligible.
This… unity, however, was under great threat by the 15th. Just as the Secretary of State’s popular momentum began to falter, one of his many lawsuits hit home. Specifically, it was the suit filed in the Eastern District of California against the state’s governor, Barrueco v. Zhou. The case did not strictly run into sovereign immunity issues, and the court had jurisdiction over Sacramento, which proved to be all the justification needed by the judge, an ambitious, young snake looking to curry favor in a future Barrueco Administration. The case was expedited to the Ninth Circuit for an en banc review.
Now, put your legal hats back on; I promise this’ll be the final time. The typical appellate court case in 2039 was heard by a random panel of three judges, as it had been for many decades prior, and as it still is to this day. Obviously, there was no guarantee that the outcome would accurately reflect the opinion of the whole court, but since the average Circuit Court heard thousands of cases each year, the sheer impracticality of having every judge deliberate on every case made this risk necessary. En banc sessions heard by every judge were thus reserved for when the panels ruled in an egregiously unrepresentative manner—or when the case was so important that it wasn’t worth the risk of drawing a bad panel. Barrueco certainly fell into the latter category. Unfortunately, the Ninth Circuit in particular had a bit of a problem: it was massive. With twenty-nine judges, a true en banc hearing hadn’t been doable for quite some time. Instead, for the Ninth Circuit, en banc simply meant using a larger panel of eleven judges. Put differently, while unlikely, just a mere six out of twenty-nine judges could write a ruling that could only be appealed to the Supreme Court.
(Who were dead, need I remind you. While Kim had nominated new justices a week prior, Rudolphson had followed suit a day later. The Senate, which was slowly filling with temporary appointments, followed the lead of Senator Frost and refused to act until the crisis was resolved.)
Generally speaking, about a third of all Federal Judges were supportive of Barrueco’s lawsuits. Of this group, about half were holdovers from the Troubles looking to sow chaos in a bid to open up a path to victory for Rudolphson. The others were mostly sympathetic to the Secretary’s analysis of Kim—they may have been judges, but they weren’t about to blindly follow the law if that meant letting the Union splinter. Finally, rounding out the group were a handful of ambitious fools. They believed Barrueco was still all but assured the Presidency, if not now then in the 2040 election, and hoped their loyalty would be noticed when the next circuit court or Supreme Court vacancies arose. The end result of this motley coalition was that many of the circuits were having to hear appeals of at least some of the many lawsuits put forward by the Secretary. By the 15th, the Third Circuit had ruled 10-4 against Barrueco, and the Seventh Circuit had ruled 9-2 in the same direction. The Fifth Circuit would see a more contentious 10-7 ruling two days later. Since these were all heard properly en banc, a third just wasn’t enough.
The Ninth’s ruling was scheduled to be delivered on the 18th, with Barrueco’s case being made on the 16th, and Governor Zhou’s on the 17th. All the 15th brought was an announcement of that schedule—and of the judges who would be hearing the appeal. Yet that was all Kim’s folks needed to see to know that they were in trouble. All four of the Ninth’s Heritager-aligned judges were selected, meaning they needed just two Barrueco sympathizers.
By the 18th, something close to a calm had settled over the nation. Kim had secured the rest of the Northeast, specifically Maine, Vermont, and New Hampshire. Barrueco had finally broken out of the Sunbelt, winning the approval of Nebraska’s legislature. Finally, Idaho and Arkansas had injected some much needed life to Rudolphson’s bid, though both had been delivered by unilateral declarations from the states’ governors. The Mid-Atlantic, New York, the West Coast, the Rust Belt, Texas, and Florida all remained silent, however, almost as if they were waiting for the ruling.
The 6-5 decision was a shambolic mess, with the “majority” opinion being signed onto by only two judges. The rest put out concurring opinions of various levels of bald-faced hackery. One outright stated that the Ninth lacked jurisdiction yet still ruled against Kim. While the judges largely punted on the issue of whether Governor Zhou could be forced to “recognize” an Acting President, they all agreed that Clause 6 did not contradict the Succession Act. Consequently, bumping was valid, and Barrueco was rightfully the Acting President.
Now, circuit courts have reached disagreeing verdicts for as long as they’ve existed. We even have a name for it: a circuit split. In the US in 2039, these splits were typically resolved by the Supreme Court—which was problematic here, seeing as they were, you know, still dead. So what happened when a split remained unresolved? There was no hierarchy between the various circuits or any other automatic mechanism. Instead, each circuit continued to interpret the law according to the way they had ruled in the split. Thus, in the eyes of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and all courts inferior to it, there was a different Acting President.
Goodbye, unity.
In some ways, I’m being overly dramatic about the actual effects of the Ninth’s ruling. The aforementioned opinion noting the Ninth’s lack of jurisdiction gave plenty of officials cover to ignore the judgment. Moreover, nothing was stopping countersuits from being filed, appealed back up to the Ninth, and reheard by a different en banc panel, thus reverting the decision. There’s no actual rule that courts have to uphold precedents; it’s just one of those norms that people stick to because otherwise the rule of law falls apart. And that gets at the true reason behind the importance of Barrueco v. Zhou and the 18th of February. It was the point where these courtroom battles stopped having any effect on the real world. Instead, they became something closer to an endorsement, an increasingly-less-prestigious badge of honor for the winner. After all, if the next case would see the outcome overturned, what else was the ruling good for? This breakdown was largely restricted to cases involving the succession crisis: just five days later, a three-judge panel drawing from the same group of six decided to suddenly start respecting stare decisis for a labor dispute. Unfortunately, when you’re fighting over who the (Acting) President is, little else matters.
The courts and other implements of the rule of law had failed. Control would thus depend upon those capable of wielding hard power. In other words, it was time to see who could win the backing of the power organs. Or, for that matter, if anyone could.
Most people already have a mental image of what it looks like when there is a fight for the support of the military—namely, a bloody civil war. This usually arises from the fact that dictatorships, the countries most prone to having succession crises, inevitably have severe dysfunction in the upper echelons of their armed forces. After all, anyone capable of unifying the service would be a potential threat to the Dear Leader. Not so in the United States of 2039. Underneath the President were the various Cabinet agencies, yes, but that did not create as much of a possibility for chaos as might be expected. The vast majority were utterly irrelevant to a power struggle; you’d never see the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development having all that much of an effect on the crisis. Almost all of the actual combat forces were under the Department of Defense—which is to say, under Secretary Ozoemena.
There was of course more to the equation than just the traditional military. The National Guard contingents were quasi-jointly controlled by the states; Homeland Security controlled a veritable menagerie of smaller forces, capped off by the Coast Guard; the Department of Justice controlled the Marshalls and the FBI; the Department of Energy had quite a bit of sway over the nuclear stockpile; the CIA was its own beast; and there were the Capitol and DC State Police. However, the importance of these organs was marginal. Most, such as the various law-enforcement agencies, were only valuable as first-strike forces and were otherwise insufficient to wage a full civil war. A few fell into the opposite pattern, their utility growing only as the time frame of the dispute extended; however, by the time they’d be major factors, the war was likely to have already been won or lost.
While the Secretary of Defense was single-handedly in control of America’s military might, it’s also worth noting that the immediately relevant forces were also quite centralized. Under the Secretary were eleven unified combatant commands, each under the unitary command of a four-star admiral or general. Able to influence the power struggle, however, were only two of the eleven: Northern Command, which had jurisdiction over all of North America, and Special Operations Command, which controlled the SEALs and their like. Another two, Cyber Command and Strategic Command, were theoretically useful but less so in practice. Hackers weren’t able to occupy locations, and nobody was quite ready to fire missiles. Not yet, at least.
To summarize, a scarce few people held the keys to the succession crisis: one secretary and two four-star commanders. Realistically, any one of them could have attempted to seize power personally, although none harbored any desires to do so. (All of them, even Ozoemena, sufficiently believed in American Democracy.) That didn’t mean they were happy with any of the other options, however.
It’s finally time for me to introduce the closest thing our story has to a hero: Admiral Esme Reuben, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. She was neither the commander of NORTHCOM nor SOCOM. In fact, she commanded no forces whatsoever—the Joint Chiefs had been removed from the chain of command in 1986. Pure chance had conspired to save her from dying during the State of the Union. Hours before, she had been rushed to Walter Reed with a case of appendicitis; she learned about the attack while recovering in post-op. After a few more days of recovery in an undisclosed location, she returned to her primary job of advising the (Acting) President on all matters tactical, strategic, and logistical.
Very few fragments of the Admiral’s journal ever made their way to the public, and she never published a memoir or autobiography, but what we do know makes one point abundantly clear. Reuben loathed Ozoemena, believing her to be self-centered to a fault, the type that would never approve a plan when there was an alternative that put her closer to center stage. Reuben thus feared that the Secretary would relish the role of kingmaker, and considered such an outcome a worst-case scenario. So long as the public knew that the military had crowned the President, public trust in democratic norms would crater, even relative to where they already were. The current crisis would thus be nothing but a prelude to an even worse one, one where the forces of authoritarianism would have had time to prepare. In short, the very fate of American Democracy—and, by extension, global democracy—was at stake. Consequently, before the decision on Barrueco v. Zhou had even been handed down, the Chairwoman of the Joint Chiefs began lobbying the various constituent commanders, hoping that she could convince them to refuse any harmful orders.
I’m in a rather unfortunate bind regarding the rest of our story. Up until now, I’ve been able to draw from a wealth of primary sources. While not entirely factual—autobiographies are prone to being exaggerated and sensationalized in the name of mass appeal, and the same applies to contemporaneous news reports—they usually aren’t total fabrications, either. By taking in a sufficiently broad and varied array of such sources, tempered with sworn testimony, logs, transcripts, and declassified signals intelligence, one can construct a fairly accurate account of the events of February 2039. The fruits of my doing so, the version I am presenting here, is broadly similar to the one historians have come to accept—right up until the 19th. Then, the information stream shrivels up and all but dies. Previously talkative sources go silent. The newspaper archives descend into wild speculation. Official reports suddenly become walls of black, redactions not set to be declassified until 2115. Most chillingly, the autobiographies all bluntly, harshly, and woodenly state,
For the sake of public safety and stability, the events of February 19th to the 28th will not be discussed.
A gag order, in other words, almost certainly at Admiral Reuben’s behest.
There is an official line regarding what happened in the week after Barrueco; however, nobody takes it seriously. It only makes sense if, during that interval, the contenders for the Acting Presidency suddenly and miraculously lost all of their ambition, hubris, and other detrimental cognitive biases. Russia also put out their own version, ostensibly based on signals intelligence; but their propagandists left the story so distorted, presumably to exaggerate their intelligence capabilities, that not even the Russian press believed the absurd fabrication. The Chinese, the Indians, and most of our European allies presumably have a better picture, but they seem quite content to respect the 2115 declassification schedule. So where did I source mine?
A manifesto, a suicide note, and a leaked first draft of an autobiography! No, I won’t be elaborating; I leave it as an exercise to the reader.
By the evening of the 19th, all three of the contenders had reached out to Secretary Ozoemena. These were not offers, per se, not first bids in a negotiation to win the Secretary’s favor; for that would imply competence on the part of the claimants as usurpers. (American politicians in 2039 had little hands-on experience with staging coups.) Rather, they were the faintest, most timid of feelers, scarcely more than invitations to “discuss the current situation.” Before she could answer, however, the Secretary went dark.
From what I’ve been able to uncover, Ozoemena doesn’t appear to have been kidnapped. None of her staff reported her as missing, nor did they even so much as inquire as to her whereabouts. Moreover, upon her reappearance just before noon on the 20th, nobody found her demeanor strange nor any sign that she had been threatened or coerced. Whatever had occurred, it aroused no suspicion. Nevertheless, it was purged from her schedule, never to be spoken of again.
The Secretary scrapped whatever plans she had regarding the pretenders. (She had been quite interested to see who was willing to support remilitarizing Korea’s restive north.) Instead, she invited the three to meet with her, no preconditions, no questions asked. However, these talks weren't to be held in DC. Instead, they were to be in an obscure building on the outskirts of Fayetteville. That just so happened to be a few minutes’ drive from Fort Bragg’s Pope Army Airfield.
All of our trio felt suspicious of the proposed meeting. Rudolphson even went so far as to call it a trap. But what choice did he and the others have? If the offer had not been made in good faith, then that meant the Secretary had already made—or been forced to make—her decision. Staying in DC wouldn’t keep them safe from the (almost) full might of the United States Armed Forces. It might force a public storming of the White House, Naval Observatory, or Octagon House, but the crisis had reached the point where the ensuing public outcry would no longer preclude such an operation. Suppose, on the other hand, that the offer was genuine. Then this might very well be their last shot at power. Yes, the shack that the address pointed to was atypical, but so was everything else related to the crisis. Besides, perhaps it was some hidden Army safehouse. Or maybe Ozoemena was just making an old-fashioned power move. There was an inexhaustible supply of rationalizations. While none were wholly satisfactory, the sheer volume overwhelmed any misgivings the contenders had. They thus set out for North Carolina.
The claimants made their way to the meeting site in relative anonymity. They had been asked to arrive at various times in the darkest hours of the morning, accompanied by minimal staff and security details. Kim still had Secret Service protection and took five agents and her chief of staff along; Barrueco did the same, albeit with private security guards. Upon arrival, both found themselves surrounded by what appeared to be special operations forces. The two surrendered without a fight.
Rudolphson, in contrast, proved more problematic. The Heritager had wished to hire professional guards but found himself overridden by his putschist colleagues and was instead shepherded to the meeting site by a local militia. When surrounded, the white nationalists took a less pragmatic approach than Barrueco’s and Kim’s details had and engaged the soldiers. The ensuing firefight lasted for around four minutes and saw seven militiamen dead and Rudolphson shot in the hand—friendly fire from the militia, of course—before the remainder finally surrendered.
While the fight had been brief, four minutes of sustained gunfire was more than enough to alert the local police. The ambush force thus had to beat a hasty retreat from their “safehouse,” bringing their captives along. Barrueco and Kim were ultimately united in an out-of-the-way conference room, and Rudolphson joined them an hour or so later after a medic had treated his hand. (This delay led to a darkly amusing misunderstanding, wherein the former two took the latter’s absence to mean that Ozoemena had sided with the Heritagers—a rather baffling prospect, given her immigrant heritage.) Finally, the three were joined not by the Secretary but by Admiral Reuben.
There was a good deal of confusion at first. Like I’ve said, Reuben commanded nothing—how had she even been able to detain them? The answer, to put it in a groan-worthy and trite manner, was that she did command something: trust and respect. When she brought her concerns to the commanders of NORTHCOM and SOCOM, the two accepted Reuben’s worries almost immediately. While NORTHCOM pledged neutrality in the crisis, the admiral in charge of SOCOM, Quintrell Armstrong, took matters even further, attempting to find a way to resolve the crisis. Eventually—by which I mean after a few minutes—Armstrong came up with a plan Reuben approved of: locking the idiots in a room until they hashed something out.
Of course, there was a bit more to it than that. For one, the admirals felt that the three claimants all needed to withdraw from politics, if not from public life altogether. Additionally, the deal needed to be completely finalized before anyone left Fort Bragg. (Again, nobody wanted to see where the Heritagers’ praetorians might spirit their increasingly reluctant leader off to.) There were a few-dozen additional restrictions, but as best as I can tell none ever came into play. With these demands made, Reuben left the ostensible Acting Presidents to negotiate a solution.
As the sun rose on Monday, February 21, the nation awoke to the news that all three of its recognized leaders had traveled to Fayetteville to hold marathon negotiations to resolve the crisis. Reuben herself made the announcement, complete with brief statements by Kim’s and Barrueco’s chiefs of staff and Rudolphson’s “head of security.” The contenders’ other staffers were surprised by this development, to say the least; many privately suspected that the talks hadn’t been initiated voluntarily. However, in the wake of Barrueco v. Zhou, information in the various camps had become so compartmentalized that nobody could definitively say that the military had kidnapped the three. With nobody of importance crying coup, the media were thus content to take Reuben’s press conference at face value. Sure, the two administrators were paler than ghosts, and sure, Rudolphson’s representative had a hastily bandaged gash across his head, but those were easily rationalized away. Better to put their faith in this sudden, new off ramp away from military dictatorship and civil war.
At the same time that Reuben was giving her speech, the three claimants came to an agreement on an outline for de-escalation. First, they would all simultaneously submit to the Senate a nominee for Vice President. The senators could thus safely ignore the question of which nomination was legitimate. Then, once the new Vice President was anointed, the trio would all resign, making their shared successor the new President.
(No, that’s not a typo; they would actually become the President, not the Acting President. Assuming that provisions in the Constitution applied mutatis mutandis to the Acting President, Section 1 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment would ensure this strange leapfrogging. Of course, one could also reasonably interpret the necessary changes to include modifying the second occurrence of “President,” and a truly stubborn lawyer might argue that, on matters relating to succession, it was reasonable to assume such provisions didn’t apply at all, but Reuben made it chillingly clear she would not tolerate such legal sophistry.)
Kim, Rudolphson, and Barrueco were, needless to say, quite proud of this solution, nevermind that it had taken them scarcely half an hour to figure out. Actually implementing it, however, proved much more challenging, for they became hopelessly lost in their search for a Vice President. The issue wasn’t ideological. Barrueco and Kim, for all their personal animosity, were in agreement on most policy matters; and Rudolphson was not inclined to argue all that strongly on behalf of the wingnuts who’d just shot him. The issue was rather that just about everybody who was qualified to serve as President had died on the 1st. The various governors were probably capable, but the political environment around them was so charged that Reuben preemptively vetoed the lot. Who did that leave, then? A handful of recently (and not-so-recently) retired or defeated senators and representatives? Most of them were gone for a reason, typically a combination of old age, scandal, or plain old lack of political skill. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there was the current crop of “rising stars;” however, none of the trio felt comfortable handing the Presidency to the mayor of Altoona, no matter how good a campaigner they were.
Reuben had to intervene when the three contenders suggested her as a possible nominee. She vetoed the idea of course, along with all other active-duty military. (Prescient, given that their next suggestion was Admiral Armstrong.) It was patently obvious that elevating a four-star admiral to the Presidency would create the appearance of a coup. That the idea had even been considered was alarming. However, Reuben knew the underlying issue: the trio just weren’t equipped to vet scores of minor politicians. She had been loath to provide the claimants with much of any support, for that would slow the negotiations down. Even in the most dire of crises, the top leaders of negotiating factions rarely barricade themselves from public view for more than a day at a time, and the sense of relief suffusing the nation would only mollify people for a few days at most.
Salvation came from the United States Intelligence Community—or so my sources say. I’ve never quite been able to square this with reality, as the USIC was in many ways not unlike a herd of cats, and ascribing any singular action to them is hard to imagine, particularly under our story’s circumstances. My best guess as to what actually happened is that Armstrong was able to leverage SOCOM’s close working relationship with said agencies to request information in a manner that didn’t blow the involuntary roundtable’s cover. Either way, by the morning of the 22nd, Kim, Rudolphson, and Barrueco found themselves with reams of dossiers and profiles, some collected directly by the US intelligence apparatus but most having been borrowed or stolen from foreign services. With this they could finally make some headway.
The trio found their man on the 24th: Martin Iannarelli, a former senator from Pennsylvania. At only forty-three, Iannarelli had been considered a rising political star as recently as three years ago. The man had come to prominence in 2024 as an athlete, having done the unthinkable and won all three Grand Tour cycling races—the Giro d’Italia, the Tour de France, and the Vuelta a España— in the same year, along with two golds at the Paris olympics—for the cycling road race and time trial. After a nasty crash the next year prematurely ended his cycling career, Iannarelli put his Ivy League education—Penn, of course—to use and became a venture capitalist. By 2032, after successfully identifying several promising startups and otherwise becoming alarmingly wealthy, the man ran for Congress. Two years later, he ran for the Senate, won in a landslide, and found himself on the prestigious Foreign Relations Committee. Then, in 2036, he and his colleagues went to tour an American lily pad in Nicaragua, where he was severely wounded by an IED. He was in a coma for a month and subsequently resigned to focus on his recovery.
Iannarelli’s health two and a half years later was… questionable, to say the least. He suffered from chronic pain, had minimal use of his left arm, and was easily exhausted by simple tasks such as walking up and down flights of stairs. It wasn’t clear if he had the physical constitution to serve as Commander in Chief. However, if the former senator still retained half of his previous political acumen, he stood a chance of doing the unthinkable and unifying the country. After all, he’d taken Pennsylvania with almost two thirds of the vote. That just didn’t happen in swing states. It also helped that the intelligence agencies hadn’t been able to find any trace of scandal around Iannarelli. (At least four other top candidates our trio looked into had had to be crossed off over corrupt dealings.) Oh, and as a bonus, he had privately guessed what Reuben was up to and, in a text to his wife, expressed approval.
The admirals had Iannarelli flown out to Fayetteville the next day, where he was read into the situation. He had extreme doubts as to whether he was fit to be President and rattled off a list of others he thought more qualified. Kim, Rudolphson, and Barrueco quickly combed through this new list—just about all of whom they had already rejected—and then thoroughly walked their man through the dossiers that showed exactly why these alternatives were inferior. Come the evening, Iannarelli’s confidence in humanity was severely shaken, but he was convinced.
At 9:00 on Saturday, February 26, the trio of now-former contenders emerged from their involuntary isolation. To an overfilled room of reporters, they announced their plan to end the succession crisis. Ianarelli joined them a few minutes later, to confused looks. Many in the audience had forgotten who the man was, but once the information was paged back in, the press ran with it. It took less than an hour for the phrase “National Unity President” to saturate the airwaves. The Senate didn’t convene until Monday, as many of the new Senators, fearing the talks would come to naught, had fled the country; however, once they had a quorum, they confirmed Ianelli’s nomination by unanimous consent. At 21:43, Kim, Rudolphson, and Barrueco proclaimed their resignations; and at 21:44, twenty-seven days to the minute after the last President had died, Iannareli was sworn in as the Fiftieth President of the United States of America.
Thus ended what historians have come to know as the February Crisis.
Of course, no near-civil war ends that neatly. A number of Rudolphson the Elder’s supporters immediately decried Rudolphson the Younger as a “traitor to Anglo-Saxon America” and refused to recognize Iannarelli. However, these militants were few in number and lacked any sort of realistic goal to rally around. Aside from a handful of ineffective attacks on DMV locations, most of these extremists did nothing more than refuse to pay taxes. The FBI didn’t even have to conduct any sieges.
Untangling the Gordian knot of legal decisions proved somewhat more challenging. The number of judges who had revealed their utter lack of integrity was troubling, to say the least; some twenty-one district court judges and twelve appellate judges appeared to have outright ignored the law, to say nothing of the state judges. Ultimately, however, these hacks were dealt with just as anticlimactically as the ethno-nationalists were. In a bid to restore confidence in the courts, the House—still awaiting special elections to replenish its ranks—brought articles of impeachment against the jurists. The Senate, now repopulated to twenty senators, looked to be set for a fierce fight over conviction. Then, these “Corrupt Thirty-three” promptly resigned. Over the next few weeks, similar scenes played out across the country, as the architects behind Cooper and its ilk were forced out. It was almost as if they’d been threatened by some men in black suits.
As per Reuben’s orders, Kim, Rudolphson, and Barrueco all withdrew from the public eye, to varying degrees of success. Kim returned to her original line of work, funding renewable agriculture startups. It was a quiet job, one where she never had to worry about hard power or coups ever again. Rudolphson, in contrast, dramatically reinvented himself. He took his injury during the firefight with the militia as a sign from God that his beliefs, his very way of life were in error. After a year of self-reflection, he disavowed the Heritagers and all that they stood for, to a fair amount of national disbelief. He spent the rest of his life desperately attempting to atone for the pain and suffering he—and even more so his brother—had caused. Finally, Barrueco… well, he just vanished. He wouldn’t be heard from for almost a decade, when he resurfaced in Korea as an advisor to their government on the neverending insurgency in the north.
Secretary Ozoemena, for all that Admiral Reuben disliked her, managed to keep her job. That is, she served out the remainder of Iannarelli’s caretaker term. Yes, she did have a rather annoying cognitive bias towards putting herself at the center of things, but that mattered a good deal less in a properly functioning government. Once 2041 rolled around, she headed to the private sector, joining the board of directors of a major defense contractor. Three years later, Admiral Armstrong retired from the military and did much the same, albeit at a rival company. I don’t know enough about the internal workings of defense contractors to know if the two did anything other than fill seats, but I do know they were well compensated.
Reuben fell somewhere in the middle relative to our other dramatis personae. She stayed on for six months, to assist Iannarelli with covering up the final few days of the crisis. After completing this task, however, she retired post haste. Here, I mean retired in the common sense of the word: she started cashing in on her pension and departed from the labor force. Presumably, she felt some sort of guilt over what she had done, nevermind that it was the first coup in the entirety of history whose purpose was truly to restore democracy. She never spoke about the events again. In fact, she never spoke to the media again, save for one time when her granddaughter won a local math competition.
The fate of President Ianarelli will require a bit more space. After serving out the remainder of his caretaker term, he opted to run and was properly elected. However, he ended up serving three full terms. Of three-years each. And he was elected unanimously each time. By nine hundred people. Who were also representatives. Moreover, while Ianarelli wasn’t the last President of the United States, the end of his first term on January 21, 2041 marked the last time that the President wielded any executive power.
We have the Extraordinary Presidential Commission on Governmental Stability—EPCoGS, for short—to thank for this turn of events. Convened just a week after Ianarelli’s inauguration, the commission was tasked with recommending reforms, both statutory and constitutional, to ensure America never faced another succession crisis. Most people expected a new “succession amendment” of some type, for which there seemed to be nationwide support. Instead, EPCoGS came back with an indictment of presidentialism itself. As they saw matters, the core issue was not the poor wording of Clause Six and the Succession Act, but rather that the President was seen as an embodiment of the “Voice of the People.” A Vice President could lay some claim to having such a mandate, but a cabinet secretary? Thus, no matter how airtight the legalese, any Acting President would run into issues of legitimacy.
The obvious solution was to make it so that the death or resignation of the President would immediately trigger a new special election. Unfortunately, that introduced a number of secondary issues relating to keeping presidential and congressional elections in sync. Letting them get out of sync would run the risk of the President never commanding a majority. Tying Congress’s schedule up to the President’s would effectively allow the President to trigger snap elections by resigning. For the reverse, an unpopular President might seek to blunt electoral backlash by resigning a year early. These issues could be dealt with by carefully written provisions; however, EPCoGS viewed such fixes as legal bandaids. The root cause, they felt, again stemmed from the question of legitimacy. The House, Senate, and Presidency all could represent different, possibly contradictory popular mandates. So long as this conflict remained unresolved, even the most airtight of procedures would eventually fray.
The commission saw one way forward. They needed to make it so that there was only one voice of the people, that these bodies either agreed or had a clear order of precedence. The Senate was the easiest to deal with, with EPCoGS proposing that it be stripped of most of its powers. The House and the Presidency, however, proved more challenging. Which would carry the popular mandate? How were the two to be kept in agreement? If only there were a system of governance out there with centuries of battle-testing that was predicated on the legislature and executive agreeing…
That’s right. They recommended the US adopt a parliamentary system.
Most people felt that EPCoGS’s recommendation was a severe overreaction. After all, it spat in the face of the Founding Fathers’ conception of separation of powers. However, it would have resolved the February Crisis neatly: Kim would have led only for a month or two, at which point new general elections would have been held. Had the Heritagers tried their putsch regardless, the House would simply have passed a motion of no confidence later in the day. And if Barrueco had still decided that Kim needed to be removed, any legal chicanery could have been reversed (or approved) by the surviving Representatives. Iannarelli thus endorsed the commission’s proposal and had a series of amendments drawn up to overhaul the US government. The end result looked fairly close to the German system.
The political fight over the reforms was fierce, to say the least. Initial polling put public support at only thirty-two percent, although well over half were undecided. Through an aggressive combination of bribery, blackmail, intimidation, and other forms of corrupt malpractice, Iannarelli pushed the measures through before the 2040 primaries began. Thus of course he stayed on as President. He’d brought this new rendition of America into being; showing up after every election to convene Congress and swear in the new “First Minister” was the least he could do.
I am writing this in the year 2071. It’s a year many in my circles have been dreading, for 71s often seem to bring about interesting times: Manzikert, Lepanto, the German Empire. But right now, at least in America, things are stable, if not quite fine. Parliamentarism has treated the country well enough; the fact that nobody has to worry about “trifectas” any more has left the government considerably more responsive and agile. On the other hand, 2054 saw them burn through three First Ministers. Partisanship and polarization have dropped down to levels not seen since before 2010, although that probably has more to do with the House now being proportional—implemented in 2055—than anything stemming from the February Crisis. In some ways, there’s honest cause for optimism.
There’s also plenty to be pessimistic about. The biggest threats remain automation and the demographic time bomb. The former threw half of Europe into bloody revolution; the latter left vast swathes of Japan to be reclaimed by nature, and saw China transformed from a rival superpower to the Sick Man of the Pacific in just two decades. The US’s (relative) affluence and (comparatively) pro-immigrant policies have done admirably to hold the two reapers at bay, but they’re beginning to reach their limit. So will the Arsenal of Democracy survive these bullets? No clue. Yours truly is a historian, not an oracle. I’m sure they’ll put the country through challenges that make our story look like a cakewalk. But if there’s one thing I learned from my study of the February Crisis, it’s that Americans have a knack for getting out of sticky situations. They’re an equal parts crafty and lucky bunch.