Tempting, but wrong. At first, the White House simply announced that the attorney general and Department of Justice were studying the actions by the dissenting states and that the president would speak when the legal review had been concluded. One week later, the president called a press conference and started with a statement. His treatment of the interposition issue was almost casual in tone, even dismissive. The president said the Justice Department had reported back to him that the purported “interposition” was of no legal effect. Accordingly, as far as the federal government was concerned, The Blessing was in full force in every state, and all federal law enforcement personnel had been instructed to act accordingly. Any federal law enforcement officer not doing his or her duty would be dismissed, and any person interfering with federal law enforcement would be prosecuted. At the end, almost as an afterthought, Jordan mentioned that the attorney general had advised him that he had concluded that there were substantial grounds to believe that various state officials, in attempting interposition, had violated the Defense of Freedom Act, and he was convening a grand jury to consider indictments.
The Defense of Freedom Act, the updated version of the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts from the early days of the Union, was passed by Congress at President Palin’s behest following the 7/22 attacks. Its martial law provisions survived judicial review, but the “sedition” part, which initially had been struck down by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds, had entered into force earlier in the year when the post-Moore court reversed its position. The sedition provisions, similar to those that also had been in effect during parts of the First World War, provided that no use of the mails or other instruments of interstate commerce (including telephone, fax, or Internet) could be used for the transmission of “any material urging treason, insurrection, or forcible resistance to any law.” The president’s casual concluding remark was explosive: the administration was considering prosecuting the Sec Bloc governors and legislators for “sedition” due to their actions in “resisting” The Blessing.
We had not anticipated this move, and Jordan’s response was a major disappointment. I asked Sanjay to come in to share his views with the governor. Sanjay’s advice was clear:
“Jordan’s casualness, Governor, was not an affectation. Your interposition response was fully anticipated by the feds. Their only uncertainty was how many states would go along. The days allotted to the purported review of interposition by Justice was a fiction; my sources tell me that the response to interposition had been ready to go before you began the speech at the Statue of Liberty. Their main strategy now is most likely to be a show of force designed to intimidate Sec Bloc states from pursuing secession. They will find a few Sec Bloc states with loyal FBI bureaus and where the National Guard will accept a call to federal duty. They will then proceed in these states with high-profile arrests and prosecutions of governors, Democratic leaders in the legislature, newspaper publishers, and others.”
“Will they try that here?” the governor asked.
“Highly unlikely, Governor,” Sanjay answered. “I think they will be more tactical. I have found five states where, by arresting the governor, lieutenant governor, and the head of one branch of the legislature, the governorship will pass to a Republican. This is not one of them. Also, I doubt they can count on the Guard and other federal law enforcement here in New York.”
“OK. Good. Go on.”
“After the arrests, I am quite sure that the proceedings will be martial law proceedings in military tribunals. With missing governors, or new leadership loyal to Jordan, a number of the states that stood with you at the statue will be knocked out of the secession movement. But in addition to those, I fear that governors and legislative leaders of a number of other states simply will be intimidated by the threat of arrest and disappearance. For the rest, I believe they have a plan for the Christian militias to instigate violent confrontations in the state capitals, to which the administration will respond by federalizing the National Guard in that state and establishing military security. That “security” will either intimidate or outright prevent the state legislatures from convening. That will make a secession vote impossible. That, sir, is what I believe you face. You had twenty-one other states with you for interposition. I believe that number could drop to fifteen or, in the worst case, as few as eight, for secession.”
“Can they really take over the New York Guard?” the governor asked. I answered.
“Yes. Since 2007, a governor’s consent is not required for the president to assume command of the Guard in a state. What we need to do is ensure that all the senior officers are loyal to you, sir. If they are not, we must replace them while we can. I’ll go see each of them. OK?”
“Take the jet.” There were benefits to working for Mike Bloomberg.
We needed to replace only about a half dozen Guard senior officers in New York State. Within two weeks I had sworn written statements from all the senior officers that they would refuse orders from Washington and answer only to the governor, notwithstanding any order to the contrary. This was a brave thing for these men and women to do. If we lost, it would be treason. I had similar meetings with each of the FBI, Homeland Security, and other federal law enforcement agencies in the state. They were in a difficult place, but most of them were New Yorkers, many were Catholics and Jews who felt personally threatened, and most were opposed to the Christian Nation idea. I simply asked if they would recognize the state’s interposition statute and decline orders to enforce The Blessing. Most said yes. And New York—unlike many other Sec Bloc states, such as California—was not home to large regular military bases close to urban areas. With the Guard and law enforcement on our side, it would be difficult for Jordan to mount the sort of direct intimidation and intervention that Sanjay predicted.
The day I came to work for the governor, he asked me to start work on secession, but he emphasized that the word was not to be uttered in meetings and that no one—not even other senior staff—was to know that it was an option that he was actively analyzing. Once again it was our opponents who provided the template for the move that we were now considering. Secession scenarios had been analyzed and promoted by the fringe groups on the right, many of them fundamentalist, for decades. By 2011 there were six active secessionist organizations in the state of Texas alone, groups like Texas Nationalist Movement and Texas Secede. Although some had been simply nutty, others had pursued a sophisticated investigation of the legal, moral, and philosophical arguments that would have supported a split from the United States. For most of this time, the notion of secession had been a fringe idea, a powerful taboo that required mainstream politicians to avoid any hint of association or sympathy with these groups. But early in the Palin administration, following revelations of her husband’s flirtations with a secessionist group in Alaska, Governor Rick Perry in Texas had broken the taboo and publicly acknowledged the movement, implying there might be circumstances where secession would be legitimate.
The law on secession here in the United States is completely straightforward. Under the Constitution, unilateral secession is prohibited. In the 1869 case of Texas v. White, Chief Justice Chase wrote, “What can be indissoluble if a perpetual Union [established under the Articles of Confederation], made more perfect [the express goal of the Constitution], is not?” Notwithstanding the obsession of some Christian fundamentalists with compacts and covenants, their view of the American union as a voluntary compact that could be exited at will was simply incorrect. As the chief justice explained, “The act which consummated [Texas’s] admission into the Union was something more than a compact; it was the incorporation of a new member into the political body. And it was final. The union between Texas and the other states was as complete, as perpetual, and as indissoluble as the union between the original states. There was no place for reconsideration or revocation except through revolution or through consent of the states.” As a result, I was clear with the governor from our earliest discussions of the subje
ct that talk of secession was talk of revolution. And for that he didn’t need a lawyer, but he would have to call on the considerable body of moral and political philosophy regarding the justification of illegal and violent resistance to the established order.
In the case of interposition, we took care to have a sound legal basis for disapplication of The Blessing. But secession was a completely different matter. We were indifferent as to whether our purported secession from the Union was or was not valid. This is because none of the governors actually wanted their states to leave the Union. Secession was a purely tactical move designed to again raise the stakes for Jordan and the Congress and provide them with a powerful incentive to come to some sort of settlement or accommodation with that part of the country that was resisting the theocratic project. We calculated that the seceding states might account for up to 43 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. By withdrawing, the members of the Sec Bloc would deprive the federal government of 47 percent of its tax revenues. New York alone accounted for nearly 10 percent of the federal government’s revenue base. Put simply, without the more liberal coastal states and other large economies like Illinois, the federal government would not be viable.
During the last month of 2017, arrests and civil violence unfolded around the country largely as predicted by Sanjay. Following arrests on sedition charges of state leaders in New Hampshire, Iowa, Wisconsin, and New Mexico, new conservative Republican governors took office. National Guard troops and Christian militia shut down the smaller state capitals, including Olympia, Washington; Salem, Oregon; and Lansing, Michigan, preventing the legislatures there from convening. At the end, secession legislation became law in fourteen states: New York, Massachusetts, California, Maine, Connecticut, Vermont, Maryland, Rhode Island, Hawaii, Illinois, Delaware, New Jersey, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania.
The governor had asked me to draft some sort of declaration or joint statement that could be made by the seceding states. At the outset of the Civil War, the southern states took similar approaches to secession. Each adopted an Ordinance of Secession, typically providing that the acts taken to join the Union were repealed and that the union of their state with the other states accordingly was dissolved. But a number of southern states also issued a Declaration of Causes, and these I studied carefully. One night in early December, I sat down at my desk in the governor’s midtown office to start drafting our version of a Declaration of Causes, which would take the form of a statement by the governor on behalf of the seceding states.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard for many minutes. I stared out the window up Third Avenue toward 42nd Street, unable to start. It was 10 p.m., and yet the traffic was as dense as that in most American cities at rush hour. Suddenly I saw myself from above, sitting at the desk, and realized that this person was about to draft a document that would rank among the most important in American history. But sitting at the desk wasn’t a Jefferson or a Lincoln, a Webster or a Clay—it was me. It must be a mistake, I thought. Sitting there was a lawyer, a technician, and an advisor to others; a person who saw both sides of every argument rather than embracing one side with passion. Surely this was not the person to write the words that would tear apart a great nation that had endured for nearly a quarter millennium.
But honestly, there was another reason altogether that I hesitated. I was scared. I knew that I was committing treason. I am a person who is uncomfortable jaywalking, who gets fidgety if exceeding the speed limit, and who is burdened with a bourgeois respect for authority. I knew that secession is unlawful and that treason is a crime rarely judged kindly by history. We will probably lose this fight, and then what, I wondered. I will be arrested, convicted in a martial law court, and what—shot? I couldn’t blame the evangelicals for this one. Treason is a capital crime almost everywhere. Tap those keys and die.
As insights go, this was one I could have done without. I called Sanjay and asked if I could come over. After a couple of Brooklyn lagers, I explained my problem.
Sanjay laughed.
“I hardly think it funny that I’ve discovered that I’m a coward.”
“You are not a coward. You are a human being. Everyone is afraid. Fear is a gift. Sometimes fear is a salutary warning to step away from the precipice. Sometimes fear is simply a call to courage and action. You must decide which, but I think you already know that.”
The next morning I went to the office and finished the statement. When the fourteenth state had passed and signed its Act of Secession, the governor called a press conference that was carried live throughout the country. He read the short statement I had drafted on behalf of the fourteen governors:
Fourteen states have today suspended their participation in our federal Union. We do so with heavy hearts but with a strong conviction that we have acted in the best interests of our great nation and its people. Even the greatest country can lose its way. A strident minority has seized the instruments of federal power intent on implementing a theocratic society completely at odds with our Constitution, our values, and our traditions. This is not merely a debate about politics or policy. The freedoms and lives of millions of Americans are at grave risk. Neither the fourteen states stepping out of the Union today, nor the thirty-six remaining states, can prosper or endure on their own. We have taken with us nearly half of the federal government’s revenues and over 40 percent of our national economy. Know this and take courage from it—deprived of these resources, President Jordan and all those who serve him cannot govern. They cannot succeed and they cannot implement their theocratic vision. Take courage and stand against them because they can be defeated. Our nation must and will again be whole. When the voters return to power people committed to the restoration of constitutional government, we will rejoin the Union. When the so-called Blessing is withdrawn, we will return. When martial law is lifted and our fundamental freedoms are restored, we will return. We will return. My fellow governors, our brave legislators and millions of our citizens join with me in making this promise: We will dedicate our lives, and make any sacrifice required, so that America will be whole, free, and great again.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Holy War
2018
If your brother, the son of your father or of your mother, or your son or daughter, or the spouse whom you embrace, or your most intimate friend, tries to secretly seduce you, saying, “Let us go and serve other gods,” unknown to you, whether near you or far away, anywhere throughout the world, you must not consent, you must not listen to him; you must show him no pity, you must not spare him or conceal his guilt. No, you must kill him, your hand must strike the first blow in putting him to death and the lands of the rest of the people following.
—Deuteronomy 13:7–11
“Yes, march against Babylon, the land of rebels, a land that I will judge! Pursue, kill, and completely destroy them, as I have commanded you,” says the Lord. “Let the battle cry be heard in the land, a shout of great destruction.”
—Jeremiah 50:21–22
You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.
—Napoleon
THE START OF THE HOLY WAR was anticlimactic. Everyone knew the inevitable consequences of secession, and the only question was how and when Jordan would react. He chose a presidential address on Christmas Day. It is worth quoting:
My fellow Americans. Today is Christmas Day, a day which America, as a Christian Nation, has solemnly celebrated for all of its national life. So to each of you and your families, I wish you a happy and joyous Christmas, filled with the light and grace of Christ. 2018 years ago last night, an angel told a simple shepherd the greatest news that has ever been communicated to a human being—that our loving Father had sent us a redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ. Today, I share with you similarly joyous news. America, God’s shining city on a hill, the consummation of all He desired and planned for His children, has itself nearly completed its own redemption as a Christian Nation. The Lord never said it would be easy. For nearly 250 years He has
tested us with the challenge of establishing human dominion over a vast wilderness, and most recently the challenge of casting off a thoroughly corrupt and disobedient culture that brought down upon us the grave weight of God’s displeasure. Our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified for us at Calvary, taught us to shoulder the burdens of the Lord joyfully, and so I tell you today the good news that we are now prepared to shoulder—with joy and determination—the last burden set for us on the path of God’s plan for man. I hereby declare that the United States of America is at war—a Holy War for the Union—with the states that have purported to secede from our great and God-given nation. Our Union is a holy and indissoluble one, like holy matrimony, and only the hand of Satan would dare attempt to rip it asunder. So with reverence, I pray that God will accept this national sacrifice on the day of Christ’s birth. I know that you join me in committing our nation to this course. By the Lord’s birthday next year, our national redemption will be complete, our nation will be whole and finally truly free, and all Americans will live in peace until the joyous time when we ascend to eternal life by the grace of Jesus. Thank God for the Blessing of His Word and His law, God bless each of you, and God bless America.
It was an odd feeling, during that winter, to hit the gym and go through my familiar routine; to ride the subway where I often sat near the same large Jamaican woman reading Guideposts who always gave me a friendly smile that made me feel good about my morning; to queue up at the same coffee cart where Abdul didn’t need to be told my order; to pass through the metal detector sternly operated by the largest state trooper I had ever seen; and to enter the governor’s midtown office and sit down in front of a computer like millions of other New Yorkers, all doing what we always had done, as if nothing had changed. And then, when you least expected it during the day, you would look out the window and suddenly remember that we were at war. Something called a Holy War, no less, which somehow felt infinitely worse. But we knew it only because Jordan had said so, and a compliant Congress, with all Sec Bloc representatives and senators absent, had agreed.
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