He looked up from the laptop at the reason. Even from that height, he could see boarded-up storefronts, office buildings with few lights or none, streets that had half their usual traffic. The country was hurting, and the federal government had done too little about it for too long. Bridgeport shook his head, forced his attention back to his speech and tried to figure out what he could say that would balance that brutal reality.
7 September 2030: St. Louis, Missouri
The original plan had been to house all the delegates to the constitutional convention in one of the big downtown hotels in St. Louis, as close as possible to the America's Center convention venue where the meetings would be held. Well before the negotiations could get under way, though, the big media firms and a flurry of other interests had already rented big blocks of rooms in every available hotel. By the time everything was finally settled, the delegates were scattered in a dozen different hotels, in among reporters, politicians, lobbyists, and all the other hangers-on that a big convention attracts, and the buses hired at the last moment to shuttle attendees to and from the convention had to dodge downtown traffic as they veered through the streets.
Still, Harriet Elkerson thought, she hadn't done too badly. Her hotel was most of a mile from the America's Center, but it wasn't as crowded as some of the ones closer in, and the guests were by and large more entertaining—the Australian journalist she'd met at dinner the night before, for example. She got off the elevator, walked into the lobby.
“G'day,” said McGaffney.
“Oh, hi.” She glanced up at him. “Any idea how soon the bus is supposed to show?”
“Supposed to be any minute.”
The bus chose that moment to roll past the big windows and stop right out in front. Elkerson got in line with the others, showed her delegate's badge to the driver, found a seat. Out the window she could see McGaffney striding out to the sidewalk and flagging down a taxi. Probably a better idea, she thought; he'd be settling into a place in the press room well before she got off the bus.
Conversations started around her well before the bus was under way. This was the big day, the one that counted. The week before had gone into the usual preliminaries—committee assignments, election of officers, jockeying over a handful of motions of no importance except as tests of voting strength—and all the while, or so the rumors had it, an unofficial committee put together by the state legislatures was putting the finishing touches on an amendment to the US Constitution prohibiting Congress from telling the states how to spend their money. The plan the state legislatures had in mind was clear enough: bring that up, get it voted in, and then vote to adjourn before any other proposals could be brought up.
Elkerson knew she wasn't the only delegate who had other plans.
The bus rolled through downtown St. Louis, past the boarded-up businesses that made up so large a part of the American landscape these days, and finally got to the convention center. There were 435 delegates—after much bickering, the states had settled on one representative per House district—and so it took a good long time for her to get into the building, check in at the credentials desk, and get to her seat on one side of the Washington delegation, right up next to the seats reserved for Virginia. She'd taken the precaution of bringing her crocheting tote, and settled down to work on a baby blanket for an impending grandchild while delegates milled about, sound checks boomed over the loudspeakers, and the last preparations got made.
Despite it all, the gavel came down on time; there were more preliminaries, report of the credentials committee, reports from a few other housekeeping committees, and then the chair of the committee on legislation got the floor. Elkerson put the half-finished blanket away. The chair, a bottle-blonde lawyer from Michigan, reported on the proposed amendment and moved its adoption; someone from Idaho seconded the motion; the convention chairman opened the floor, but nobody took the bait. The question was called, and Elkerson tapped the green square on her voting tablet. The amendment passed overwhelmingly, 356 to 79.
The moment the applause died down, a state assemblyman from California was on his feet, making a motion to adjourn sine die, and before he'd quite finished talking, another state politician from Colorado was rising to second it. Debate wasn't allowed on motions to adjourn. If the states’ attempt to railroad the convention was going to get anywhere, Elkerson knew, this was when it would happen.
The vote was called, and she jabbed the red square on the tablet. The numbers went up on the screen above the podium a moment later: 182 for, 253 against.
The room burst into a buzz of conversation. The chairman looked as though someone had poleaxed him. Before anyone else moved, one of the delegates was on his feet. “Mr. Chairman.”
“The chair recognizes the delegate from Tennessee.”
“Mr. Chairman, now that that's settled, I'd like to remind everyone that the resolution we just passed isn't the only proposal that's been brought forward. I move, Mr. Chairman, that those other proposals be referred to their proper committees and brought before this body for a vote before we pack up and go home.”
Elkerson managed to press the button that called on the chair a fraction of a second before anyone else, and stood up.
“The chair recognizes the delegate from Washington,” the chairman said grimly.
“I second the motion,” she said.
“The motion is moved and seconded, and the floor open for debate.”
This time there was no shortage of debate, but when the vote finally took place at three in the afternoon, the vote was 261 for, 174 against. When the totals appeared on the screen, Elkerson leaned back and allowed a smile. Maybe, just maybe, the hopes of the people who'd sent her to St. Louis would have their day.
15 September 2030: St. Louis, Missouri
Harriet Elkerson pulled out her crochet and sighed. It was going to be another long day.
The motion on the floor was something about the right to bear arms, yet another issue where half the country wanted one thing and the other half wanted the opposite. There had been a steady parade of issues like that since the vote eight days earlier had thrown the convention open. Old quarrels about gun ownership, abortion, and the place of religion in public life surfaced yet again, and the proponents on each side came out swinging.
Then there were the new issues, the ones nobody had thought to argue about until the possibility of amending the Constitution came into sight. Some of the proposals, she thought, were good ones—delegates from half a dozen states had called for hard limits on the power of presidents to wage war without consent of Congress, for example, and she'd decided to back a measure to do that if it was well written and came to a vote. There again, though, what sounded like common sense to one end of the country sounded like lunacy to the other end, and vice versa. It wasn't just liberals versus conservatives; choose a fault line through the middle of America, Elkerson thought, and it's on display right here.
The delegate who had the floor finished talking, and sat down. Someone else took his place and started in on what promised to be another pointless tirade.
After the first few words, Elkerson slumped back in her chair and said wearily, “I've got an idea. Why don't we just dissolve the Union and let everyone have what they want.”
“I could live with that,” snapped the delegate from Virginia, a lean white-haired man with a string tie, who was seated next to her.
She thought about that while the speaker ranted on. She'd meant the comment as a bitter joke, but it occurred to her that maybe there was a point to the idea. A memory surfaced: the evening when she and her second husband, on the brink of another pointless quarrel, looked at each other, realized that though they liked each other they couldn't live together, and decided that getting divorced was the only way to save their friendship. Maybe it was time to do the same thing with a country that wasn't really one nation any more.
The delegate who had the floor wound up his tirade, and someone else rose to argue for the other side of
the quarrel. In the moment of quiet that followed, Elkerson turned to the man from Virginia and said, “I'm starting to think a lot of people might be able to live with that.”
He gave her a long look, then said, “Ma'am, I'm not going to argue that one bit.”
She considered that. “Got plans for lunch?”
His eyebrows went up. “Not yet.”
“I figure that's probably long enough to draw up a resolution.”
When the convention broke for lunch, the two of them walked half a block to a Burmese restaurant, got settled in a booth, and started working out the details. Both of them had decades of experience in state politics, so it took them only a few minutes to work out the text of the resolution in pencil on a yellow legal pad:
Article I: The Union of the States is hereby dissolved, and the several States shall be free to make other arrangements for their welfare.
Article II: All property of the former federal government in each State, at the time this amendment is ratified, shall become the property of that State.
Article III: All property of the former federal government outside the territory of the States shall be divided by agreement among the several States.
That afternoon, the two of them presented the resolution to the committee on legislation. The response was stunned silence. After a few minutes, the chairwoman of the committee huddled with the parliamentarian, found that the resolution was in proper form, assigned it a number—Resolution 58—and scheduled a hearing on it for the next day.
Within hours, word of the new proposal had spread through the convention, and that evening it was the one subject on nearly everyone's mind. As the next morning dawned, everyone at America's Center from the delegates to the kitchen staff sensed that something immense had happened. A line had been crossed, and there might be no going back.
PART FIVE
DISSOLUTION
TWENTY-FIVE
16 September 2030: Austin, Texas
Governor Terry McCracken leaned forward and blinked. The headline on the computer screen didn't change: New Convention Proposal Would Dissolve Union. The article below named the two delegates who'd introduced Resolution 58, gave the text, and then dismissed the whole thing as an edgy joke. A couple of sentences from some New York pundit, hoping out loud that the prank might bring the convention to its senses, finished it up. McCracken read the article a second time, shook his head, and reached for the phone to call the head of the Texas delegation. Some of them might be dumb enough to vote for it, after all.
Before his hand reached the phone, he stopped, and then drew the hand back, propped his elbows on his desk and rested his chin on his hands, looking at nothing in particular.
He sat up after a few minutes, reached for the phone again and punched the number. “Jack? Yeah, this is Terry. Just got the news about Resolution 58.” A pause. “Yeah.” Another. “Yeah. What kind of response is it getting from the delegates?”
He listened for a while, then said, “I'm thinking that it might actually be worth talking about. Take a straw poll of our people, and if they're in favor of it, I won't say no. Tell ’em that.” Another long pause, then: “Okay, good. Give my best to Millie. Talk to you soon.”
He put the phone back in its cradle, pushed his chair back, got up and walked over to the state flag, standing there next to the window. Neither he nor anybody else in Texas ever forgot that their state was bigger than most European countries, and that it had been an independent republic for a while and a state in the old Confederacy for a while after that. Maybe, he thought, just maybe, one or the other of those were better options than staying hogtied to Washington DC, and to forty-nine states that never could manage to see plain common sense the way Texans did.
Of course there was a personal dimension as well. In the aftermath of the crisis, he'd ended up with a hero's reputation across Texas, and in most of the other southern and western states. That was nice, but it wouldn't parlay into anything on a national level. There was a time, not too many decades back, when a powerful politician on the state level could count on a career in Congress, but these days, breaking into the hermetically sealed political world inside the DC Beltway took money and corporate connections he didn't have, and a personal life less cluttered with things nobody in Texas cared about but the national media did—say, the five kids he'd had by a string of Mexican mistresses.
But this way…
There would never be a President Terry McCracken of the United States, but of the Republic of Texas? That was another matter. He could almost taste it, and it was good. It was damn good.
He was far from the only ambitious politician thinking such thoughts at that moment. In the hours and days that followed, as their influence began to make itself felt, conversations in St. Louis and across the nation began to shift.
16 September 2030: Lumberton, Mississippi
Jim Owen stared at the television screen in disbelief, but the words refused to go away: Delegates Say Let's Dissolve Union. The talking heads above the banner were chattering away in their flat Yankee accents, making fun of the idea, but he gathered from what they were saying that the thing had actually been put before the convention as a serious proposal.
After a moment he hauled himself to his feet—not easy, that, with one leg still half full of shrapnel from a near miss, down near Caracas in his Army days—and went to the fridge for a beer. The floor of the cramped little mobile home creaked beneath his steps. The government made all kinds of promises about financial help for injured vets, but these days the money wasn't worth much more than toilet paper, and after the last round of budget cuts, the free health care he'd been told he would get was a joke—the nearest VA clinic was 300 miles away, and word among vets was that you could get on a waiting list for an appointment but there wasn't a chance in hell you'd get past that. Thank God he'd learned enough about engines to scrape by doing auto repair and stock-car rebuilds for friends and people in town. It was mostly barter these days, but it kept body and soul together.
He got the beer, twisted the cap off and popped it into the wastebasket halfway across the kitchen, and went back into the trailer's cramped little living room. The talking heads were still at it; after a moment he grabbed the remote and clicked the sound off. A moment later, the banner changed to Would Make States Independent.
He took a long pull of the beer, lowered the bottle. Not gonna happen, he told himself. Not in 100 years.
But if it did…
He downed another swallow of the beer. Without those morons in Washington getting in the way of everything sensible, maybe times wouldn't be quite so hard for a poor-ass Army vet in south Mississippi, and for a lot of other folks as well.
He shook his head, picked up the remote, switched to another channel. Across the country, as he did so, millions of Americans were thinking similar thoughts.
17 September 2030: Guthrie, Oklahoma
Clyde Witherspoon made sure the mike was switched on, handed it up to Suzette and gave her a thumbs up. The mike was new; so was the sound system, and so was the banner across the front of the platform, though it had the same slogan on it, “Independence? OK!” Of all the new things the Oklahoma Independence Party was learning to get used to, though, the most important was the crowd of people in front of the platform. A year before, they'd have counted themselves lucky to get twenty people to show up to a public meeting; over the summer, they'd had hundreds of people turn out for rallies in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, and now this.
“I want to thank each and every one of you for coming out tonight,” Suzette said, and her voice boomed across the city park. “I know you had other things you could be doing right now, but you saw the news, just the same way I did. You know what's being debated in St. Louis right now, and you know just how important it is to make your voice heard.
“Nine years ago I helped found the Oklahoma Independence Party because I saw the good people of this state being treated like dirt by the government in Washington. I saw one bad law
after another getting shoved down our throats because the government in Washington doesn't think we deserve a voice. And I saw it was time to do something—and now the rest of the country is starting to see the same thing.”
It was true. Clyde had been fielding emails and phone calls all day, not just from Oklahomans—there were plenty of those, too—but from all over the country, from people who were sick and tired of the federal government and thought the states might be able to do better. What was more, there were other parties in other states that were pulling in the same direction; just before the rally, he'd spent half an hour on the phone with a guy from Vermont who worked for an independence party there, making plans for the days ahead.
“That's why we're going to St. Louis,” Suzette shouted. “We're going to St. Louis, to tell the delegates what the people want. We won't be alone, either. People are coming from all over America to tell the delegates that it's time to put the federal government out of our misery.”
The crowd roared its approval.
“And I want you there.” Her voice dropped, the way it did when she was close to the end of a speech. “I want you, all of you, or as many of you as can come, to come with us. We're renting buses for those who need a ride; we've got maps for those who don't. I want to see the good people of Oklahoma standing there, alongside the good people of every other state, to tell the world that we're fed up.
“We're fed up with the broken economy. We're fed up with a president and a Congress that can't get anything done. We're fed up with no money for our veterans, no money for our old folks, no money for anything worth doing, but plenty of money for whatever white elephant the Pentagon wants to buy this week. We are fed up with the fed-eral government. And I want you with me to tell the delegates that. Are you with me?”
They were.
The next morning, the buses loaded up outside the Oklahoma Independence Party's new headquarters, six of them, joining fourteen from Tulsa and no less than twenty-two from Oklahoma City, all rented with funds from the lavish new donors the party had attracted over the months just past. Every other political movement advocating the breakup of the United States had the same good fortune, and acted accordingly.
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