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Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Fiction. Show all posts
In Part III, a bizarre death at the U.S. Supreme Court has thrown the U.S. presidential election into deep uncertainty. In the last installment of this story, Inauguration Day nears. As President Trump barricades himself in the White House, Americans wonder at the failure of their hallowed electoral and legal systems to decide the result of their presidential election. Who will take the oath of office on January 20, 2021? 

By Dan Lawton

Part IV

Kamala Harris’ transition team had planned a grand inauguration parade, complete with marching bands and floats. One of the floats, her press person said, would carry as passengers all of the people of color who had ridden the bus to school with the young Harris when the courts were trying to de-segregate the public schools in California. They weren’t the crew of the PT-109 and this wasn’t 1960, but it would get the point across. 

Harris’s people had called the White House and Secret Service again and again, but they were not returning the calls, and the president was ignoring her own calls to the Oval Office. It was customary for the outgoing president to put the president-elect up at Blair House, across the street from the White House, the night before the inauguration. But Trump had ordered Blair House boarded shut and surrounded by U.S. Army troops of the 82nd Airborne Division, citing national security concerns after someone had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a window late on New Year’s Eve.

To the new veep-ascendant, it didn’t matter. She had her own private security detail. They would show the Secret Service and White House staff every courtesy during the transition. The media was on her side, the philistines and Neanderthals of Fox News excepted.

No one had ever muscled their way into the White House before. But no one had ever needed to. Every beaten incumbent, however bitter and stubborn, had yielded gracefully to the protocols of the orderly transfer of power, a tradition of which Americans were justly proud. Harris had been in contact with the Joint Chiefs and the D.C. police and the CIA and Trump’s cabinet, all of whom had resigned.

Get ready, ‘cuz here I come, she thought, playing the chorus of the old Temptations song in her head as she tried on designer pantsuits in a mirror, surrounded by a small coterie of fashion consultants, tailors, and sycophantic weasels in her suite at the Hay Adams Hotel, just across the street from the White House. Through the window, she tried to catch a glimpse of the White House.

It was invisible.

Overnight, a fleet of immaculate shiny white buses had come trundling into the capital in the dark, endless columns of them rumbling over the Key Bridge, the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge, the 14th Street Bridge, and the Memorial Bridge, escorted by Secret Service agents on motorcycles, and then converged on the White House, which they had slowly encircled. The drivers had carefully parked just outside the fence marking the perimeter of the White House proper, bumper to bumper, with barely an inch in between. They kept the engines idling, generating a cloud of exhaust which rose above the White House.

The first ring of buses had enclosed all 18.7 acres, plus the Ellipse, the grassy park to the south of the executive mansion. A second procession of buses had then encircled the first ring and parked just outboard of it, forming a fourteen-foot-high double barrier of buses which no protester or outlaw could hope to penetrate without heavy equipment and a private army.

From the air, the double enclosure of buses formed an outline that looked like an upturned fist with a raised rectangular middle finger. Troops and cops in full body armor and camouflage had flooded the streets for two square miles around the Capitol. They were beating protesters, loading them into paddy wagons, shooting pepper balls and tear gas and rubber bullets in every direction. Diaphanous clouds of tear gas were all over the place.

The smell of tear gas wafted up into Harris’ suite. Everybody started dabbing their eyes. A junior aide rushed into the bathroom and noisily threw up in the toilet without shutting the door first.

The Secret Service was providing security and intelligence as usual but otherwise seemed to have fallen into a state of temporary paralysis. The supervisors were said to have contingency plans in place for the big day. No one told the public what they were.

Three thousand miles away in California, John Ducey got ready for bed. What if Trump won't go, he wondered. He recalled that, in Venezuela in 2019, there had been an electoral freak show featuring a competing pair of presidential inaugurations, each featuring a man who solemnly insisted he had been elected president. Venezuela was a failed state, of course, a basket case even by banana republic standards. John turned out the light and drifted off to sleep.

On January 20, 2021, at 7:30 a.m., Kamala Harris made her way toward the east front of the Capitol building. A big phalanx of private security guards and Capitol Police officers surrounded her and her husband, Douglas Emhoff, who looked pretty presidential himself. Two days earlier, Trump had ordered the Secret Service to arrest her. But the agents refused to carry out the order. Trump had gone batshit over that.

Over the heads of the men ahead of her, Kamala Harris caught a glimpse of the grand view beyond the glass -- the National Mall, the spire of the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial, the Potomac River, all of it laid out in 1791 by the French military engineer Pierre L’Enfant. Across the Potomac, barely visible, were the white columns of the Custis-Lee Mansion in Arlington National Cemetery, the onetime home of the famous Confederate general Robert E. Lee. Harris had learned about the mansion in the sixth grade.

After the Civil War started in 1861, the federal government had turned the place into a barracks for Union Army troops. After the war, she remembered, the government had made the general sue to get it back. Harris had read that Lee once ordered two of his own slaves whipped after they had tried to escape.

Who knew how many black and white Americans had died and suffered horribly because of the battlefield brilliance of Lee, America's most glorified traitor?

Harris allowed herself a rare moment of self-congratulation.

Screw you, Robert E. Lee, she thought. How do you like me now?

There had been no coffee at Blair House, of course. Harris had had a short phone call with Trump late last night. His utterances which had not been incomprehensible grunts and screeches had been vague. Trump had calmed down a little just before hanging up on her and dropped his voice down to just above a whisper.

“See you at the inauguration, Kamala,” Trump croaked into Harris’s ear. “I’ll be there.”

Trump sounded hoarse, a little slurry, like he had been up all night, shouting at anyone who would listen, working the phones between obsessively watching TV screens, wolfing down fast food.

But this morning, there was no sign of Donald Trump at the Capitol or the White House.

He had exhausted every legal tactic, tweeted nonsense around the clock, fired all his lawyers and hired new ones. But now, maybe he was going gently after all.

This is happening, Harris thought. Ruffles and flourishes coming up. She heard the brass section of the Marine Corps band warming up outside.

To Harris’s right, a pair of Capitol Police men opened a door and ushered her into the secret office which lay behind it.

The room was one of the best-kept secrets in the Capitol. The modest door, which bore no sign, made it look like a janitor’s closet. But when you walked in there were high ceilings, grand frescoes, the best work of the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi. A president got to see it once in a lifetime, at his first inauguration. Or her first.

A set of papers bearing the Great Seal of the United States lay on a handsome walnut desk.

Harris signed them quickly. The agents surrounding the table all stood at attention, taut, ready to escort her outside to be sworn in as America's first black woman president. John Roberts and Nancy Pelosi and Mitt Romney and the rest of them were out there in the crisp January air in their overcoats and hats and scarves.

In Long Beach, it would be the eighteenth U.S. presidential inauguration John Ducey had watched on live TV. He and his parents had huddled around a radio to listen to FDR being sworn in in 1940 and 1944, before his little family owned a TV. John dearly loved the pageantry of presidential inaugurations, the patriotic music and soldiers and sailors and Marines in their perfect uniforms and the masses of flags and the VIPs sitting onstage to watch the new president ushered into office.

But this was going to be the best one yet.

It's still the greatest country in the world, John thought. A black woman.

He turned on the TV and settled in to his old leather armchair.

Right away, he was confused. The networks were displaying split screens today.

On the left side of the screen, Donald Trump stood in a black overcoat, a splash of red tie showing, with his right hand in the air and his left hand on a Bible. He was at his golf club in Virginia, on a big round platform. The platform sat atop the grand water sculpture that overlooked the golf course and the Potomac River. Ordinarily the water sculpture space was reserved for weddings. Today it would be the site of what Donald Trump was calling his second inaugural.

Trump had had trouble finding a respectable federal judge to administer the oath to him. But, at the last minute, the Senate rushed through the confirmation of his most recent nominee to the federal bench. It was John Yoo, a law professor from Berkeley. His biggest career achievement had been writing torture memos for the CIA during the early 2000s. Yoo had just been sworn in himself yesterday, with a beaming Dick Cheney holding the Bible as Yoo took the oath.

Kamala Harris's words resonated a mile away, down the National Mall. It was carpeted with 1.9 million people, the largest crowd ever at a presidential inauguration, giddy Americans of all races and ages and both sexes.

"I, Kamala Harris," she said.

"I, Donald Trump," said Donald Trump, thirty miles away. His words echoed too, out across his verdant fairways and greens, all the way down to the river's edge.

"Venezuela," John Ducey said to himself.

Then he turned it off and went to go put on his jacket and get in the car and drive over to campus and get his three miles in.

➽ Dan Lawton is a lawyer and writer in California.

Unprecedented (IV)

In Part II, the U.S. presidential election has wound up deadlocked in the Electoral College and on Capitol Hill. In a reprise of Bush v. Gore 2000, the battle for the White House enters the courtroom of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, D.C.

By Dan Lawton

Part III

On January 14, 2021, thirty-six of America’s brightest young law school graduates, the law clerks to the Justices of the Supreme Court, sat in the chairs set between the columns on the south side of the courtroom, at rapt attention, awaiting the emergence of their nine bosses. In the gallery, no members of the public had managed to score a seat. It was wall-to-wall Beltway royalty, senators and agency heads and big-shot journalists. They were exchanging handshakes and backslaps and chumming around like it was a social occasion. A couple of them accosted Morgan Chu and Brian Panish personally and wished them good luck or bad luck or whatever. 

Behind the four white columns and the dark red curtain, the Justices were in the vestibule of the conference room, pulling their black robes out of the wooden lockers mounted on the wall, like football players suiting up for a game. Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg were the only three who had been there when the court decided Bush v. Gore in 2000.

For Breyer and Ginsburg, the memory was still a bitter one. Finding themselves on the losing side of the 5-4 decision which installed George W. Bush as president, each had dissented and joined the dissents of their late colleagues David Souter and John P. Stevens. Thomas had voted against them and voted with William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Anthony Kennedy, sending Al Gore down to bitter defeat and off to political Siberia.

Among the Justices, nobody wanted to talk about that one today. The court’s decision in Bush v. Gore had earned it a storm of condemnation from liberal and conservative constitutional scholars alike. Americans loved it or hated it but everyone knew it had been a nakedly political act by a bunch of unelected judges who were just as partisan as any Tea Party hack on Capitol Hill.

"Oyez, oyez, oyez," said the marshal as the nine Justices emerged from behind the curtain. "All persons having business before the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the Court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court!"

John Roberts called the two cases, which the court had consolidated, Biden v. Trump, the Ninth Circuit case, and Trump v. Harris, the D.C. Circuit case. With a warm smile, he welcomed Morgan Chu to the lectern.

"May it please the Court, your Honors, good morning," said Chu.

For the next two hours, Chu and Panish went at it, arguing over who should be the next president of the United States. Throughout, the Justices peppered them with questions. From their seats, the law clerks studied the jurists' body language, noting each frown, sigh, pursing of lips, smile, grimace, and sidelong glance.

At one minute after noon, the Justices rose as one and disappeared behind the curtain in unison. Off they went to the conference room, entering its vestibule single file. Off came the black robes. The Justices stored them in the nine wooden lockers mounted on the wall. Then they filtered into the conference room itself.

At the north end of the room sat the big table. Four handsome leather-clad swivel chairs lined each side of it. The ninth chair sat at the head of the table. It belonged to the Chief Justice, John Roberts. Shelves of the Supreme Court Reporter dating back to 1882 lined the walls. A deep pile carpet with a fussy, muted, elaborate floral pattern lay underneath their feet. Opposite the door was a marble fireplace with a dark wooden mantel. There, a little fire, carefully prepared by one of Roberts’ assistants, crackled. Above it hung an oil-on-canvas portrait of John Marshall.

Brett Kavanaugh, the most junior of the nine, shut the door, per unwritten but long-standing protocol. If someone were to knock, he was the one who would have to get up and go see who it was.

And so began the most secret of all secret government conferences in America, the post-hearing deliberations of the nine Justices of the Supreme Court.

More than one law clerk had daydreamed about sneaking in there and planting a listening device behind one of the dusty volumes that sat on the shelves when no one was around, then secreting herself in a private listening post somewhere in the building, maybe in one of the interior courtyards outside, inserting a pair of ear buds, munching a sandwich, and pretending to be deaf while drinking it all in.

The law clerks had a coconut telegraph. It was an electronic chatroom. Today it buzzed with observations, guesses, prognostications, withering remarks about Brian Panish and Morgan Chu and Trump and Biden and the herd of woolly D.C. mandarins who had taken over the gallery before the hearing began. Some of the law clerks tapped away on their smartphones and tablets in their favorite hideaways, in unused chambers of retired or long-dead Justices which overlooked one of the internal courtyards up on the second floor.

Did you see RBG roll her eyes when Panish didn’t answer her question

Yeah I guess she is writing her dissent already

Don’t be so sure Gorsuch looked on the fence/he fed Chu an opening/Chu jumped on that smelled blood

RBG is looking extra frail today/she is amazing/how does she keep going?

The Chief looked a little vexed/he remembers 2000 and what a debacle it was

Thomas doesn’t look right today/is he sick?

Maybe it is just indigestion/too many cheese fries bahaha

Who woulda thunk it/Brian Panish a PI lawyer from L. A. hits a home run his first time up at SCOTUS

A HOME RUN?! WTF/he got killed today/dude should stay in his lane/ambulance chasers don’t belong at SCOTUS

In the conference room, the faces around the table were grim. John Roberts, ever chipper and cheerful in facial expression whatever the situation, seemed dour and tense. Ginsburg looked wan and pale. At 87, she was a cancer survivor. Who knew how many rounds of chemo and several surgeries she had undergone. RBG was made out of titanium. But today she looked frail and sick. Samuel Alito, who sat across from her, studied her, wondering whether Ginsburg might drop dead right here at the table before they could take a vote.

In 2000, John Roberts hadn’t been appointed to the court yet. But, ever sensitive to the public’s perception of the court and its work, he was keen to avoid another straight party-line 5-4 decision in a case that decided a presidential election. There was already rioting in the streets. If the Justices botched it, or didn’t speak with one voice, it might make things worse in Portland and Chicago and Charlottesville and Birmingham and Los Angeles and Cleveland. As this day had neared, he had felt a sense of sickening dread. He fretted over the hard feelings which lingered at the court after Bush v. Gore. Roberts had heard that David Souter, the bookish and reclusive retired bachelor Justice from New Hampshire, had actually wept in despair in his chambers over Bush v. Gore.

There’s no crying at SCOTUS, Roberts thought.

Roberts wanted no debate, no raised voices, and no rancor this time.

He asked his colleagues for a straight up-or-down vote on the two narrowest issues at stake in the two cases. They were simple, Roberts told them.

The first one was whether California had violated the due process and equal protection rights of its voters by allowing its massive mail-in balloting program to descend into chaos amid the Postal Service’s wildcat strike. In Biden v. Trump, the Ninth Circuit had said yes, subtracting 55 electoral votes from Biden along with his Electoral College majority.

The second one was whether the Senate had violated the twelfth amendment by violating its own protocols in counting the votes for Harris. In Trump v. Harris, the D.C. Circuit had said no, making Harris vice president-ascendant and assuring her swearing-in as president on January 20.

On the first question, five or more yes votes would invalidate Biden’s Electoral College win, blocking Harris from the presidency, and making Mike Pence vice president-ascendant.

On the second question, five or more no votes would hand the White House to Harris.

“Who would vote yes on the first question?”

Roberts’ question hung in the air for a moment.

Up went a few hands: Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Thomas.

Roberts put up his own hand.

It was 5-4 to affirm the Ninth Circuit.

All five yes votes would come from Justices appointed by GOP presidents.

“Who would vote yes on the second question?”

Four hands went up: Stephen Breyer, Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor.

“Who would vote no on the second question?”

Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas all raised their hands again. Then John Roberts did too.

The four no votes came from Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, and Sotomayor, all Democrats put on the court by Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.

Roberts’ lips formed a straight horizontal line.

“I’ve already drafted the opinions,” said the Chief. “You'll have them later today.”

Breyer sighed. He saw no point in saying anything. The die was cast. It was Bush v. Gore redux, the GOP with the edge, 5-4, and the Democrats a buck short, just like in 2000. Breyer's hangdog drifted slightly upward, over everyone else’s heads, as though looking into the eyes of the oil portrait of John Marshall over the fireplace. RBG, Kagan, and Sotomayor would join him in dissent, Trump would get another four years, and that would be that. To Breyer, Kavanaugh looked red in the face, a bit flushed, barely able to conceal a triumphant air.

Breyer studied Kavanaugh, the court’s youngest Justice, more closely. For an instant he wondered if he detected the faint odor of beer.

Among the law clerks, there was a rumor that Kavanaugh kept a small secret stash of cold beer in a refrigerator in a small private office. No one had actually seen it. It was said to be Anchor Steam chilled to a temperature of 33 degrees.

“We did this in 2000,” Ginsburg rasped. She seemed to be laboring to get the words out.

“Remember what Yogi Berra said? Déjà vu all over again. Our court is intervening in a presidential election meant to be decided by the people.”

The old gal looks like hell today, Kavanaugh thought.

“The country survived Bush v. Gore, Ruth,” said Clarence Thomas, leaning slightly forward as he addressed Ginsburg, who sat two seats down from him on the same side of the table. “And all of us went on with life. Get over it. Al Gore lost, George W. Bush got elected.”

“He was appointed, not elected, Clarence,” Ginsburg shot back. “Now we’re appointing someone else. Only the names are different this time.”

The room went dead silent.

Roberts looked at Thomas. A few beads of sweat dotted Thomas’s big forehead.

“I’m sorry, Ruth,” he said in his deep chummy baritone. “I -- uh, on --“

On.

On was one of Thomas’ verbal tics, used as other people might say ah or uh. The people who had watched his confirmation hearings during the Anita Hill business in 1991 had heard him say on over and over again as he sat answering questions from Biden’s Senate Judiciary Committee.

All eyes around the table now focused on Clarence Thomas. He was a big man. Since 1991 he had put on forty pounds, exercising not enough and indulging in his favorite meal, cheese fries, too often.

Thomas wheezed, then coughed, then coughed again. Then a sort of coughing jag. Thomas’s big shoulders shook. He reached for the pitcher of water on the table a couple of feet away. He gripped the handle, then let go.

His eyes rolled back in their sockets.

Clarence Thomas collapsed, face down, on the table, his head going bonk as it struck the polished mahogany table top.

They all jumped up. Brett Kavanaugh made straight for the door and ran outside.

“Help!” he cried. “Call 911! We need paramedics in here right now!”

Samuel Alito and Elena Kagan eased Thomas’ big frame onto the floor. Neil Gorsuch started CPR.

Within seconds, a half dozen Supreme Court police officers swarmed into the room. Two of them pushed Gorsuch aside and resumed CPR. Kavanaugh shooed away a little knot of court staff who had heard him cry for help and come running.

The Justices had seen a lot of things. But this was a new one. No Justice had ever collapsed in conference just before casting a vote in a case.

A crew of paramedics had Thomas on a gurney, into an ambulance, and speeding on his way to George Washington University Hospital within three minutes. While the driver bobbed and weaved through D.C. traffic with the siren blaring, two paramedics delivered six jolts of electricity to the Justice’s stopped heart with a defibrillator.

The waiting team of doctors and nurses got busy as soon as Thomas arrived in the emergency room. They got busy massaging Clarence Thomas’ heart and injecting it with a big dose of epinephrine.

It was no use.

After thirty minutes of frantic effort, the cardiac surgeon stripped off his facemask and told everyone to stand down.

“I’m calling it,” the doctor said. “Nurse, note the time, please.”

It was 1:05 p.m. Clarence Thomas was dead.

The Justices took the news somberly in their chambers. Here and there in the big echoey halls and in the plush, wood-paneled chambers, muffled sounds of weeping and Oh my God were audible. All of Thomas’s law clerks were weeping, inconsolable.

Clarence Thomas DOA @ GWU Hospital 11:30 a.m. Had massive MI in conference/never got pulse back, one of them wrote in the electronic chatroom.

Only one law clerk replied.

Did they vote before he died?

Nina Totenberg’s story went up on NPR’s website at 2:15 p.m. “CLARENCE THOMAS’ SUDDEN DEATH LEAVES SUPREME COURT DEADLOCKED 4-4 IN TRUMP VS. BIDEN CASES,” said the headline.

Totenberg had been covering the court since the seventies, penning in-depth pieces about the court’s operations and palace intrigue for national news outlets. Longtime NPR listeners gave rapt attention to her broadcasts about this or that new court decision. In this piece, Totenberg highlighted a rule of Supreme Court procedure which was not well-known.

In the event of a 4-4 tie, the decision of the lower court stood.

In this case, the rule did not supply an easy answer. The two cases in front of the court had come from different Circuits. Each had reached a different result.

The Ninth Circuit had rejected Biden’s appeal, costing him an Electoral College win, by nullifying 55 electoral votes that would have gone to Biden, and throwing the election into the House.

But the House had deadlocked on who would be the next president. Then the D.C. Circuit had rejected Trump’s appeal of the Senate’s election of Harris as veep. That, Totenberg wrote, made Harris veep-ascendant under the twelfth amendment, clearing the way for her to be sworn in on January 20 as America’s forty-sixth president.

In his private dining room off the Oval, Trump watched his favorite broadcaster, Sean Hannity, his facial muscles a bit taut, deliver the bizarre news to Trump Nation on the Fox News Channel.

“I don’t know how to tell you this folks, so I’m just gonna tell you,” said Hannity. He spoke in his radio-guy baritone, mixing it with his earnest, New York-Irish-guy-you-can-trust look, a winning combination that had made him the highest-rated cable host on TV.

“America is in a constitutional crisis. There is an unprecedented situation at the Supreme Court. Some in the liberal media are saying that Kamala Harris is veep-ascendant and our next president. We’ll be right back after this and try to sort it all out for you. Stay with us. We’ve got Judge Jeanine Pirro coming up for you after the break as we bring you the latest.”

Just outside the Oval, Katrina Moran, Trump’s loyal young executive assistant, sat at her desk, awash in the tsunami of phone calls that flooded her telephone lines. She heard a muffled commotion coming from within the Oval. She guessed Trump was yelling and throwing things in there. It had happened before.

Inside, Mark Meadows knew better than to react at a moment like this. It was better just to listen and let it flow over you.

Ivanka and Jared sat sullenly on a sofa.

No one seemed to know where the First Lady was.

Trump was in tantrum mode all right.

“What the fuck! I mean, what the fucking fuck! What is wrong with these people? Get Brian Panish on the line, goddammit!"

It went like that on for a few minutes.

“This is bullshit! Doesn’t Roberts get to break the tie? He’s the Chief, right? Doesn’t he get two votes?”

Before Meadows could get a word in, a pair of burly Secret Service men clad in bulletproof vests hustled Brian Panish into the room. In college, Panish had played linebacker at Fresno State University. Now he looked like a big former linebacker, out of breath and sweaty, and maybe a little unsure of himself.

“We’ll be just outside, Mister President,” one of the agents said before shutting the door behind him.

“Brian, the president has a question for you,” Mark Meadows said.

A shattered piece of china lay on the carpet in smithereens. Panish wondered if it might have belonged to Jacqueline Kennedy or Dolly Madison.

Trump picked up where he’d left off.

“Brian, do I understand correctly, that when the Supreme Court ties four to four, the Chief gets an extra vote? To break the tie. Right?”

It was the first Panish had heard of that.

“I’m sorry, Mister President, there’s no such thing,” Panish said, doing his best to keep his voice even and down in the register as he caught his breath after his dash through the west gate and to thein Oval.

“So what are we doing? We get a rehearing. Right?”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Panish said. “I don’t think the rules allow us to call up the Chief Justice on the phone and ask him for a do-over.”

“That’s exactly what I want!” Trump exclaimed. “A do-over! We get a do-over! Clarence Thomas dropped dead at the table, Brian! That is un-pre-ce-dent-ed! Un-fucking-precedented!”

Now Trump was pacing around and around the room in his sock feet. He was near-hysterical, his eyes were bugging out of his head. Panish started feeling dizzy as he swiveled his head around and tried to keep an eye on his distraught client as he orbited the Oval.

Trump told Meadows to get John Roberts on the phone right now.

Panish spied a Big Mac and set of jumbo fries cooling, untouched, on the coffee table between the sofas.

He wondered if he was about to be fired. Trump knew how to fire lawyers.

When Trump paused to breathe, Panish interrupted the monologue.

“Perhaps you could appoint someone to replace Justice Thomas, Mister President,” Panish said. “You're still the president. There’s a vacancy on the Supreme Court. You could nominate a successor today. I suppose he would have to get through the Senate. Once he got to the court, the Justices could re-hear the case with a full complement of nine. I’m sure you could count on the new Justice voting your way.”

Trump looked at Meadows.

“Can I do that, Mark? Can we just replace this guy with another black guy, a very, very qualified black guy, so we can get this thing right? How long will it take?”

Meadows stammered.

“I, uh, well, the cases are under submission, sir,” he said. “Who knows if they could re-hear it under the rules. They’ve already ruled. Besides, by the time you got a new Justice nominated and confirmed in the Senate, it would be weeks from now, after inauguration day. It would be too late, an enema to a dead man, as the saying goes.”

An enema to a dead man?

Brian Panish hadn’t heard that one before. He made a mental note of it. Maybe he could use it in a closing argument to a jury someday.

Mark Meadows looked to Panish for a lifeline. You’re the lawyer here, his expression seemed to say.

Panish lifted his eyebrows slightly and shrugged, hell if I know.

Trump could smell uncertainty in a subordinate like a hungry dog could smell raw hamburger carelessly dropped on the ground at a backyard barbecue from forty yards away.

“You’re fired, you mameluke! Get the hell out of here!”

Brian Panish gathered himself. His high school football coach had chewed his ass a few times during practices. But he had never been cut from the team. And no client had ever fired him. He guessed he wouldn’t miss Donald Trump very much. He didn't know what a mameluke was.

Panish turned and strode to the door that led out of the Oval Office without a word. From without, the door opened, as though on cue.

Maybe he could still catch the last flight out of Dulles and get back to L.A. that night, he thought.

At the lectern in the press room, Kayleigh McEnany was working hard, leaning in. As ever, the press secretary wore a sleeveless top, showing off her tanned toned arms. The usual big crucifix necklace hung over her blouse, like a brooch made of golden garlic meant to stun Fake News vampires before driving the wooden stake of righteousness into their cold godless craven tiny liberal hearts.

Above the din, Jake Tapper from CNN shouted at McEnany, trying to catch her eye from his seat in the back.

“Ms. McEnany, is the president planning further legal action in the courts? Who will be sworn in as the next president?”

McEnany had waited for this moment. She directed her sweet poisoned gaze at Tapper. As she bared her perfect white teeth, her upper lip curled slightly. She looked like a sorority sister about to humiliate a drunk dopey underclassman who had dared to ask her for her phone number during a fraternity party.

“I don’t know where you got your law degree, Jake,” McEnany sneered. “I attended the Harvard Law School. The Supreme Court will be rehearing this matter once a new Justice takes Clarence Thomas's place. The American people need the court to speak clearly on this matter. I look forward to seeing you at the president’s inauguration in a couple of weeks. Thank you all for coming.”

McEnany turned and walked to her left, down the steps, and out the back of the press room, leaving a shouting, confused mass of reporters behind her. The sweaty stupefied agglutination of journalists swarmed for the exits. The print and radio slobs raced back to their cramped stations in the basement of the west wing to write their stories. The glamor-puss TV people rushed outside to do their stand-ups on the west lawn.

The following Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts appeared before a joint session of the Congress. Lindsey Graham, the chairman of the Senate’s judiciary committee, welcomed him. After some aimless pomposity, Graham got to the point.

“Mr. Chief Justice, there are those in our country who wonder about this unprecedented situation,” Graham drawled. The drawl said, I’m educated and sophisticated and a U.S. senator, but I love South Carolina lowcountry barbecue and the God-fearing freedom-loving people back home who eat it for dinner.

Roberts nodded, as though to sympathize with the masses of people who just did not understand how the justice system works, especially at Our Court, as Roberts and his colleagues were fond of calling it.

Graham continued.

“Can you address the concerns of those who believe that politics came into play in the way the votes broke down in these two cases?”

“Yes, I can, Senator,” the Chief answered. “As judges, we serve only the Constitution and the people. There are no politics at the Supreme Court. There is only the Constitution. We are as umpires in baseball. We just call the balls and strikes. Someone else decides who wins.”

In his den in Long Beach, John Ducey laughed out loud. What a joke, he thought.

In the fourth and final installment, chaos and riots engulf America. Kamala Harris rises to the moment.

➽ Dan Lawton is a lawyer and writer in California.

Unprecedented (III)

In Part I, a deadlock in the Electoral College and claims of voting fraud has sent the U.S. presidential election into chaos. A legal battle between lawyers for Donald Trump and Joe Biden has begun in a federal court in Los Angeles. Joe Biden has had a startling mental lapse on national TV. In Part II, the battle for the White House enters the Congress, where a showdown unfolds on the floor of the House of Representatives.

By Dan Lawton

Part II 

On December 8, 2020, the first contingent election of a U.S. president of the modern era got underway right after the 117th Congress was sworn in on the floor of the House of Representatives. All the lawmakers were haggard, exhausted. Some of the younger freshman representatives showed the telltale signs of having slept in their offices the night before. A lot of them couldn’t afford a second mortgage or rent payment in the capital. In the mornings they rose from their couches and showered and shaved in the House gym locker rooms.

The chaplain today was Fr. Dan Tumulty, a Catholic priest from San Diego. A little flushed and quite pleased with himself, perfectly-coiffed and resplendent in his custom-tailored black suit and Roman collar, he made his way up the aisle. Today he was standing in as honorary chaplain, at the invitation of his Congressman, Juan Vargas, a Democrat from San Diego. Back home, Tumulty was friendly with a real estate tycoon, Doug Manchester, who saw to it the dapper churchman had a full membership at a posh country club in Del Mar and a new luxury sedan every couple of years. A few years earlier, Tumulty had discreetly nudged along a Vatican-approved annulment of Manchester’s long marriage to the mother of his five children, clearing the way for the randy old magnate to marry a Russian mail-order bride who was much younger than himself. Behind Tumulty's back, some of his flock in San Diego called him Father Hollywood.

“Let us bow our heads and pray,” said Tumulty, in his smooth, Bing Crosby voice.

Tumulty offered a rambling invocation, fervently imploring the Lord to guide the women and men there assembled to do right as God gave them to see the right and put bickering and personal differences aside in the interest of protecting and preserving and so forth. It went on for a while.

After it stopped, a partial, half-hearted “Amen” rose from the floor. Tumulty stood down, yielding to the Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi. The Speaker looked almost regal in her own custom-made, royal blue Akris jumpsuit. She called the House to order. By rule, each state’s delegation was going to get five minutes at the microphone. They would go in alphabetical order, starting with Alabama.

Like Carl Albert, Tip O’Neill, and Newt Gingrich before her, Nancy Pelosi had mastered the most important skill of any Speaker. That was knowing how to count. Like an auditor peering at a balance sheet through green eye shades, she eyed the spreadsheet laid out in front of her. It listed each state, the names of its representatives, and the votes which Pelosi’s operatives and allies had told her were expected that morning.

It would be close, she knew. But the arithmetic was inexorable. There was no way Trump could get to 26. Biden had the numbers, by a small margin.

Alabama and Alaska went for Trump. That was OK.

Then Raúl Grijalva, the beefy senior member of Arizona’s delegation, came to the lectern and adjusted the mic. He seemed to be huffing and puffing, and his bolo tie, which featured a chunk of polished jade cut in the shape of his home state, looked a notch a mite tight around his ample neck.

“Madame Speaker,” Grijalva said, looking ruefully into the C-SPAN camera lens a few feet in front of him. “The State of Arizona must regretfully announce it must abstain from voting in this matter.”

A swell of gasps and whispers washed through the chamber like surf and echoed back, then reverberated.

Pelosi banged her massive gavel, bam! bam! bam! bam! bam! She kept banging it until the din subsided.

“Abstain?” said Pelosi. She arched her black eyebrows, which seemed like they sat halfway up her forehead, in disbelief.

Grijalva apologized. His colleagues, he said, had not shown up, and all of them were uncontactable. There was a report a crew of Antifa people were holding three of them hostage underground in a copper mine near Bisbee, Arizona.

Grijalva was a Democrat. But he felt duty-bound not to presume what his colleagues would have voted today, he said.

OK, a hiccup, Pelosi thought. It’s just one vote.

On went the roll call.

Biden was racking up the votes -- Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota -- just as the spreadsheet predicted.

But when New Jersey’s representative, Frank Pallone, took his turn, Pelosi noted the look in his eye as he walked up to the lectern. It’s bad news, she thought. The Speaker felt a sudden wave of nausea surge through her body. Pallone had just told her last night New Jersey was a sure Biden vote.

Pallone had some bad news all right.

A couple of New Jersey’s twelve representatives had experienced travel difficulties of their own, he said. One of them, he said, had last been seen at the edge of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, after cutting the ribbon at the opening of a new park ranger station there. He had glad-handed everyone and posed for photos before disappearing with a couple of men into a black sedan, which sped off, supposedly for the Newark airport, but never arrived.

Chris Smith, the sole Republican member of the state’s congressional delegation, was pro-Trump. But he and Frank Pallone, a Democrat who loved Joe Biden, were the only ones there from New Jersey.

“In good conscience, Madame Speaker,” Pallone said -- Pelosi rolled her eyes and stopped listening.

New Jersey was abstaining too.

Pelosi wondered what might be in store.

Things returned to normal. Pelosi checked each box as she went down her spreadsheet -- New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island. Getting there -- almost there.

“Vermont,” said Pelosi.

But the state’s sole representative, Peter Welch, a tall, genial lawyer, was nowhere to be seen.

Welch had been there for Tumulty’s prayer, during which he had been seen laughing and chatting with another congressman at his desk. But just after Pelosi had started calling the roll, Welch had ducked out, headed for the cloakroom. He hadn’t come back.

Pelosi’s voice rose.

“The State of Vermont, please,” she said.

It was right then when everyone in the chamber heard the muffled sound of a woman screaming. A couple of burly Capitol police officers in the back hustled in the direction of the scream, toward the cloakroom.

What the fuck is it now? Pelosi thought, exasperated. Her family and friends knew she never cursed out loud. They didn’t know she cursed silently all the time.

When the officers burst into the cloakroom they found the body of Rep. Peter Welch, age 73. Welch lay on the heavy carpet alongside one of the heavy dark brown leather chairs. His skin was blue. His sightless eyes stared at the ceiling. His jaws were completely agape, his lips drawn tightly around what looked like a big round glass object wedged in his mouth.

One of the officers bent over Welch and pulled it out. The foreign object was a glass jar of pure Vermont maple syrup. Welch, age 73, was dead, asphyxiated.

Back in the chamber, when order was restored, congressman Juan Vargas, the former Jesuit seminarian and Harvard-trained lawyer, rose from his seat.

“Point of order, Madame Speaker,” said Vargas. “This entire proceeding has been sabotaged, by what appears to be a cynical and carefully-orchestrated series of criminal acts perpetrated by rogue elements acting at the behest of Donald J. Trump!”

The shouting and cries arose in a storm, No! Madame Speaker! Madame Speaker!

It was pandemonium.

Out of sight, paramedics were steering a gurney bearing the lifeless body of Peter Welch to an ambulance outside.

Pelosi resumed the vote.

“My fellow Americans,” she said. Her voice quivered. The steely Speaker was ever graceful and strong in the storms of the crises that had come one after another in the last four years. Now she looked on the verge of tears.

“It is my duty to inform you,” she said before pausing and looking down.

Everybody else could count too.

Between the three abstentions and another three states whose congressional races were still tied up in the House Oversight Committee over disputes about voter fraud, six states were missing in action.

Biden had 24 votes, two shy of a winning majority.

Trump had 20.

It was a deadlock.

On TV, Toobin, Dershowitz, Pirro, and the rest of them were all dumbstruck. It had never happened before, except on “Veep,” an HBO sitcom.

No one really understood the twelfth amendment very well in the first place. President James Madison had announced its ratification in 1804. It said that, in the event of a deadlock in the House, the Senate would convene, to choose a new vice president. The vote of a majority of senators would then decide who the new vice president would be, as between the two highest Electoral College vote-getters, Joe Biden and Donald Trump. One would become vice-president, then be sworn in as president on January 20, 2021.

In the White House Trump raged to his inner circle. It was crazy, he said. He paced around and around the Oval Office, his orange spray-on tan sliding slowly off his sweaty cheeks. There was no way he could lose in the Senate, he said. There were some other things he would rather do than give up the White House. He started listing them. One of them, he said, was squatting pantsless over a flaming hibachi grill with a handful of M-80s inserted into his lower gastrointestinal tract, or words to that effect.

In the wee hours of the morning of December 11, news websites and TV screens seemed to explode like a crazy pyrotechnic display. From his den in Long Beach, Joe Ducey watched, scarcely believing what the talking heads were saying now.

Kamala Harris delivered an astonishing bit of news in a press conference at the grand front entrance of San Francisco’s city hall. Citing “mental exhaustion,” Joe Biden had withdrawn from the presidential race and been admitted to a hospital at an undisclosed location. There he was resting and receiving unspecified treatment. Jill and the rest of his family were with him. Harris asked that everyone keep Joe Biden in their prayers. He was a great American, she said, whose long record of service and love of country were unequaled by anyone alive. The anguished cries and shouts of the assembled reporters drowned out the rest of her statement.

“What about the election?” asked a reporter from Fox News.

Harris gave the young man her sternest prosecutorial glare.

“The electors of most of the states are free to cast their votes for a replacement candidate that is nominated by the Democratic Party,” she said. “Mr. Biden has asked the party to nominate me as his replacement. If that were to happen, as I hope it would, then I would ask the electors to honor his wishes and cast their electoral votes for myself.”

“Didn’t the Supreme Court outlaw that last year?”

The shouted question came from a young, geeky-looking print reporter from the Fresno Bee. He looked like he might still be in high school. But he had done his homework. Electors were duty-bound not to vote contrary to the will of the voters in their states, the court had ruled, in a case called Chiafolo v. Washington. If those states had gone for Biden, they couldn’t throw their votes to Kamala Harris any more than they could vote for Donald Trump.

“Wouldn’t they be faithless electors? Chiafolo v. Washington? Right?”

Harris thanked them all for coming and disappeared inside amid a mass of overcoat-clad security men with earpieces and aviator sunglasses.

Trump learned of the extraordinary turn of events in his private indoor golf tee box on the second floor of the White House. Right away he summoned Brian Panish, Mike Meadows, and Jared Kushner.

The men entered just as the president finished a big swing, an image of the ball sailing toward the flag and high above the fairway on the big screen. It looked like a 250-yard drive, maybe longer, or so the screen said. Meadows wondered whether Trump had had a tech support guy tinker with the equipment, to make his synthetic drives look straighter and longer than they really were.

The men found the president clad in a white track suit and a pair of red golf shoes. A red number 45 emblazoned the left vest of the suit. His hair, part burnt-orange, part straw-blonde, was every which way this morning.

“I know you’re not supposed to be happy when someone else crashes and burns,” Trump exulted. “There’s a German word for it, right, Jared? Schnaudenfest? Something.”

“Schadenfreude,” his son-in-law replied, evenly. “Maybe we shouldn’t be celebrating yet. Don’t you think Kamala Harris could be a problem? What about the Senate?”

“We’ve got the numbers in the Senate, dummy,” Trump said. He laid down his driver and walked off to get showered and exfoliated and then hit the tanning bed.

In every state which had gone to Biden on November 3 -- Connecticut, Delaware, D.C., Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington -- the electors did as they were told. They announced their intent to deliver their votes to Kamala Harris when the time came before a joint session of Congress, in a ceremony that was usually a formality, on January 5, 2021.

It wouldn’t be enough to get Harris to 270 any more than it had been for Joe Biden.

But it was something.

All she had to do now was win in the Senate.

On December 18, 2020, a week before Christmas, John Ducey and millions of other Americans tuned in to watch the first-ever contingent election of the vice-president as it began in the Senate chamber. The clerk called the roll as Mitch McConnell, the majority leader, and Mike Pence, the sitting vice president, gazed down from their perches. Every one of the hundred senators was present and accounted for. After the fiasco in the House, McConnell and the minority leader, Chuck Schumer, had seen to that.

On paper, the GOP had the numbers, of course – 53 to 47. But Mitt Romney, the junior senator from Utah, despised Trump with a white-hot righteous Mormon passion. For company, Romney had three GOP colleagues – Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Ben Sasse. All four of them had backbones. And all were sick to death of Trump's river of misspelled horseshit tweets and general abuse which the president ladled out to them and any other Republican who dared not pledge him their undying toadying fealty.

All four cast their votes for Kamala Harris.

Lindsey Graham and some other Bible Belt senators raised hell, a slew of objections under the Senate's byzantine rules of procedure. But McConnell, who knew more about the rules than anybody, gaveled them down into sullen silence.

It was all over in ninety minutes.

Looking mournful, the majority leader announced the result, in a voice that sounded like a bereaved mortician's.

It was Harris 51, Trump 49.

On CNN, Anderson Cooper, Wolf Blitzer, and the rest of the CNN political team could barely contain their euphoria.

Kamala Harris would be the new vice president and then ascend to the presidency. There were thirteen days to go before the inauguration.

Brian Panish had the new lawsuit challenging the result all ready to go, of course. It accused McConnell of having violated Senate rules in overruling Lindsey Graham's objections. Panish filed the complaint, entitled Trump v. Harris, within minutes after Mike Pence, white as a sheet, left his seat, seemingly in a daze, and vanished out the back door of the chamber.

With January 20 creeping closer by the day, the courts expedited their rulings in the case of Trump v. Harris.

On January 4, 2021, the D.C. Circuit ruled that the Senate had correctly followed its own rules. Kamala Harris was veep-ascendant. There was no president-elect. But it didn’t matter. Unless the Supreme Court stepped in, Kamala Harris could start preparing for her inauguration on January 20.

In Part III, the legal battle between Trump and his opponent winds up in the U.S. Supreme Court.

➽ Dan Lawton is a lawyer and writer in California.

Unprecedented (II)

In a polarized America riven by bitter protests and rioting, the presidential election veers off the rails and into chaos. As Election Day nears, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and others jockey for advantage. In November 2020, the election enters uncharted territory after deadlocks in the Electoral College and Congress and a bizarre reprise of Bush v. Gore 2000 in the U.S. Supreme Court. Dark forces and strange turns of events leave Americans wondering who their next president will be – and whether it will be a black woman.

By Dan Lawton

Part  I 

On November 3, 2020, John Ducey, eighty-five years old, rose at 5:30 a.m. in his bedroom in Long Beach, California. After a quick shower and some breakfast, he dressed, fed the cat, and walked down the street to his polling place. Election Day had always held some excitement for him. Today it still did.  

John was a lifelong Republican. But the Republican president, Donald Trump, seemed crazy, equal parts megalomaniac and buffoon, a trust-fund baby masquerading as self-made tycoon, a reality-TV star-turned-dilettante in government, a serial skirt-chaser, tax cheat, attention whore, and general horse’s ass. The challenger, Joe Biden, had plenty of experience, and he had given a nice speech at the convention. But seemed dopey and confused sometimes. He had a dynamic young running mate, Kamala Harris, a young U.S. senator and former prosecutor from Oakland. But John rarely cared who the running mate was. When John was a kid during the 1940s, someone had likened the veep’s role to a bucket of warm piss, an opinion John generally shared.

John checked in, signed his name, went to the little booth like he always did every election, primary and general, filled in the little ovals with black ink, folded up his ballot, and brought it back to his friend Peggy Malone. Peggy had been John’s neighbor for sixty years. John flirted with Peggy a little, thanked her, and walked out. He meant to go home, drive to the Cal State Long Beach campus, do his usual three-mile walk, and come back home to practice his saxophone for a couple of hours. John, a widower, was a retired family doctor. Now his passion was playing the saxophone. Since the coronavirus had hit, John had been playing neighborhood concerts every Saturday at 5 p.m., opening his living room windows and playing George Gershwin and Ray Charles and Duke Ellington numbers for anyone who happened by. People brought lawn chairs and wine and plastic cups and sat and listened.

John figured he would turn on the TV around 7 p.m. to watch the returns in front of a TV tray and some Chinese takeout, as he usually did on the evening of each Election Day.

This Election Day would be a little different than any that had gone before.

Since the late seventies, people in California had been mailing in ballots in presidential elections with no excuses required, but never in such high numbers as this year. Some people were scared of the coronavirus. Others were wary of voting in person during a year marked by riots and masses of surly police patrolling the streets. Seventy-five percent of the voters in the country had already voted by mail, most of them weeks earlier.

State and local election officials had done their best to keep up with the staggering volume. But, in August 2020, during one of his purple fits, Trump had slashed $25 billion from the Postal Service’s budget. Congress had tried to help, but the ensuing layoffs meant fewer postal workers to handle and sort the truckloads of ballots that came flowing out of New York and Michigan and California and a lot of other places. In some post offices, the skeleton crews were struggling with equipment breakdowns.

The heaviest volume of ballots, of course, came from California. Voters like John who liked going to the polls were aging out. In October, the Secretary of State’s office had said that sixteen million voters there had voted by mail already.

Political junkies who watched the TV coverage during the day saw an unfolding fiasco. Long lines of voters snaked around blocks in Detroit, Jacksonville, Los Angeles, Albuquerque, and other cities. Shouting matches erupted between polling station workers and voters who hadn’t brought their IDs. Some poll workers, older folks who were a little hard of hearing, had a hard time understanding the irate voters who had been on their feet all day and still hadn’t voted.

In California, things were a mess. Postal service workers had started a wildcat strike, the first one since 1970, in October. They had locked and abandoned dozens of trailers and vans stuffed with mail-in ballots in Fresno and Bakersfield and Alameda and San Diego and a dozen other places. Vandals and outlaws had set some of the vehicles on fire or hot-wired them and driven off. The day before Election Day, one of them had driven a Postal Service truck off the Coronado Bridge in San Diego, in an apparent suicide. The truck had plunged straight to the bottom of San Diego Bay, where the corpse of the driver and the crates of ballots now lay soaking up seawater.

Months earlier, Biden and Trump had both planned for a contested election and a reprise of Bush v. Gore, the epic lawsuit that had wound up at the Supreme Court and delivered the White House to George W. Bush in 2000. In private, Roger Stone, Trump’s Nixon-worshipping confidante and convicted perjurer, liked telling the president it would be Bush v. Gore on steroids.

Biden and Trump each had lawyered up like crazy.

When it came to lawyers, Donald Trump hired only the best, or so he said.

His chief of staff, Mark Meadows, wondered about that sometimes. Meadows was an affable former congressman and real estate developer, a handsome North Carolinian with a nice head of salt-and-pepper hair, Trump’s fourth chief of staff in four years. To Meadows, Trump’s ever-morphing stable of lawyers had been a mixed bag. One of them, Michael Cohen, had attended the worst law school in America -- Meadows couldn’t remember the name of it -- and just finished a stretch in prison for fraud and tax evasion. Rudy Giuliani was a big name and had been a hero after the September 11 attacks. But now, in 2020, Rudy was half in the bag a lot of the time, even while trying to get his face in front of the cameras at Fox News and anyone else who would put him on television. The impeachment defense team of Ken Starr, Alan Dershowitz, and Pat Cippolone, had been fine. As ever with Trump, there had to be a hot blonde in the mix. That was Pam Bondi. To date, all of them had gone unpaid.

Dershowitz was still calling the White House every week about his invoices. No one ever called him back.

In the Oval Office late one night back in June, Trump had sat slouched in the fat maroon leather swivel chair behind the Resolute Desk, brooding, looking at his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Meadows, who sat across from him. The thick windows and heavy golden drapes muted the chants of Black Lives Matter and No Justice, No Peace of the protesters massed outside on Pennsylvania Avenue.

The odor of McDonalds fast food pervaded the air. Meadows spied a Big Mac and jumbo order of golden french fries congealing, uneaten, on the desk.

Trump wanted to talk about recruiting a new legal team to spearhead a court strategy which would return him to the White House for four more years. With a black Sharpie, he had scrawled some lawyers’ names on a piece of paper, names he’d heard on TV or here and there down the years. Meadows eyed the list, then looked up at the president.

One name belonged to Dickie Scruggs, a plaintiffs’ class action lawyer from Mississippi. He had been disbarred years ago for trying to bribe a judge.

“None of them fit the bill, Mr. President,” said Meadows. “What we need is a Supreme Court specialist. Someone who’s in front of the Justices all the time. Ted Olson, somebody like that. He was Bush’s lawyer in 2000. That one turned out all right for Bush, sir, if you recall.”

Trump sighed, sat back in his chair and glanced at the ceiling. History bored the piss out of him.

Meadows studied the grain of the Resolute Desk. Down the years, dark orders had gone out from this desk, Meadows thought -- B-52s sent rumbling down runways to drop tons of bombs on North Vietnam, U.S. arms sold to terrorists in return for American hostages, Army troops secretly ordered to invade Cambodia, IRS audits of hostile journalists set in motion, votes on the Civil Rights Act pried out of married white Southern congressmen who would rather not see LBJ let it slip they were screwing their secretaries in the afternoons in cheap motels in Arlington.

Trump stood up and pushed his chair aside. Then he leaned forward over the desk, his enormous gut bulging against it, and planted his hands on the immaculate polished wood surface.

“Fuck that, Mark,” the president said. “They’re all part of the swamp. No more establishment queens! And no more hourly rates! They kill you with the hourly rates! I want Brian Panish. Ever heard of him?”

Brian Panish?

Kushner, his eyebrows arched in confusion, shot a look over at Meadows.

“Who the hell is Brian Panish,” said Kushner, warily.

“He’s a plaintiffs’ lawyer from California, Jared,” Meadows said. “He does death and catastrophic injury cases. He’s a big name in that field. But I haven’t heard that he’s got Supreme Court experience. How is he the right guy for this, Mr. President?”

Trump rolled his eyes. He had to yell at Meadows for a while.

“Mark! He got the biggest verdict in the history of the courts in a personal injury case! Almost five billion dollars, against GM, exploding fuel tank case. Not exactly chump change. That I can tell you.”

Meadows had heard of the verdict all right. It had made the front page of The Wall Street Journal twenty years ago. But what did Brian Panish know about constitutional law or Supreme Court practice?

“Yes, sir,” said Meadows. “Did he wind up taking that case to the Supreme Court? How does he make sense for this?”

Trump balled up his fists and slammed them down on the wood, pow-pow! Kushner was rigid, sitting at attention, like a scared freshman on his first day in high school.

“Don’t you get it, Mark five billion? Think outside the box a little! He knows how to stand up and ask for the moon with a straight face! He asked a jury to give him five billion dollars and they gave it to him! Like his client deserved that amount of money! Come on! This is our guy!”

Kushner cleared his throat. He didn’t like disagreeing with his father-in-law. But he didn’t like being blamed for things going wrong either. Trump had never let Kushner forget the Tulsa rally debacle. What if Panish or someone else crashed and burned at the Supreme Court because he wasn’t the right lawyer for the job?

“He’s never been to the Supreme Court, Mr. President,” Kushner said. “If you died in a flaming train wreck and the insurance company didn’t want to pay, he’d be our man. But . . .”

“But he’s got balls like church bells,” Trump bellowed, finishing Kushner’s sentence for him. “That’s what I want! Balls like church bells! He can go to school on the Supreme Court stuff, or sub it out. How hard can it be? He rammed it up the ass of General Motors, for Christ’s sake!”

Meadows knew what was coming next, the president’s favorite oral punctuation mark, that I can tell you.

“That I can tell you,” the president concluded.

“Yes, sir,” Meadows said meekly.

After Meadows and Kushner had slunk away, Trump picked up the phone.

“Call Dershowitz,” he told the switchboard operator. “Tell him I’m having his bills audited. Five hundred hours for the impeachment thing! At $1000 an hour! It’s bullshit!”

He slammed the phone down, bam!

If I drank booze, he thought, this is where I would have a drink.

Elsewhere in the capital, throughout the summer and into October, the cream of the Supreme Court bar sat by their smartphones and tablets, waiting for a call from the White House. Like every other lawyer in America, they felt a creeping sense of dread when their phones didn’t ring. No one called.

Joe Biden didn’t want any of them either.

“Forget those guys,” Joe Biden had told Kamala Harris back in August on the night before the convention. Biden and Harris were lawyers themselves, though neither one had a single day of experience in private practice. Harris gave Biden a quizzical look.

“I want an outsider, a big name, a smart guy,” Biden said. “How about somebody from California? You’re from California. Do you know anyone good out there?”

Harris had heard of a trial lawyer, Morgan Chu, from Irell and Manella in Los Angeles. He was said to be the best intellectual property lawyer in America.

“I like Morgan Chu,” Harris said. “They don’t come any smarter. He’s a superstar. And I think he’s got Supreme Court experience. We should want that. That’s where this thing will wind up.”

“Chu,” said Biden. “Never heard of him. He’s Asian, I guess?”

Harris grimaced a little, then nodded.

“I like it,” Biden said. “If this thing goes all the way, we’re going to be arguing about the Electoral College numbers. We’ll have an Asian guy up there talking about math!”

When Morgan Chu’s office phone rang the next morning, it was 6:30 a.m.

Chu was dressed nattily in his customary natty red bow tie and blue blazer. The early morning hours were a good time to tend to endless river of emails and sip a fresh cup of coffee in peace. Chu loved that hour of the morning, before the phone started ringing incessantly and the back-to-back Zoom calls and court hearings got going.

“Hello, this is Morgan Chu,” he said.

“Mr. Chu, good morning,” said the voice.

“Yes? Who’s this, please?”

“This is Kamala Harris. Joe Biden and I would like to hire you and your team to handle a case on our behalf in case the upcoming election goes sideways. Would you feel comfortable taking it on?”

Chu had met Kamala Harris at a fundraiser in downtown L.A. years ago, when she was running for Attorney General.

“Tell me more about it,” Chu said cautiously.

His assistant Judy came in, to tell him he had a call. Chu waved her off and silently mouthed can you take a message, I’ll call him back.

On Election Night, as John Ducey watched, CNN called North Carolina for Biden just after 9 p.m. Pacific time. The Tar Heel State had put Biden over the top in the Electoral College, with a projected 270 electoral votes to Trump’s 218.

There was still some more counting to do before it became official. But it was over. Joe Biden was going to be the forty-sixth president of the United States.

From coast to coast, wild celebrations erupted, in streets and parks and bars and living rooms. There were protests too, and some rioting and vandalism. The network anchors could hardly keep up with it all, bouncing from Portland to Detroit to New York to Birmingham and other cities where people full of fear and dread and joy and ecstasy collided with each other.

But, just like in 2000, it wasn’t over.

In the week following Election Day, lawyers were in courthouses all over the place. They were demanding temporary restraining orders and expedited injunctions, appealing or applauding or lamenting the latest rulings, decrying the threat to democracy posed by this or that ruling, baying and preening and posing for the TV cameras in what looked to be a brewing constitutional crisis. The pundits were saying the whole thing could wind up at the U.S. Supreme Court.

In Long Beach, alone in his living room, with his cat for company, John Ducey watched the coverage each night. It’s like 2000 all over again, he thought, only way more violent and weird.

There were peaceful pro-Trump protests aplenty but there was looting and rioting and fighting and assaults on police too, in Indianapolis and Portland and Los Angeles and Albuquerque and Austin and Baton Rouge and Chicago and other places. Everywhere, statues were being pulled down, set on fire, urinated on, defiled by bandanna-wearing young men who unzipped with one hand and waved a fist or middle finger with the other, and spray-painted with every kind of disgusting writing that you could never show on network television or print in a newspaper. Down came Frederick Douglass, Douglas MacArthur, Susan B. Anthony, Ulysses S. Grant, Harriet Tubman, Jefferson Davis, Martin Luther King, Jr., Winston Churchill, Fr. Junípero Serra, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, Ronald Reagan, Harvey Milk, Harriet Beecher Stowe, César Chavez, Knute Rockne, Sitting Bull, Malcolm X, George Washington, Vasco de Gama, Rosa Parks, General George Armstrong Custer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, B.B. King, Ferdinand Magellan -- on and on it went, the finest work of every bronze sculptor of his day treated like it was a monument to Hitler or Stalin, desecrated by jerks who knew as much about history as they did about sculpting, which was nothing.

In Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, some guys pulled down a statue of Robert Emmet, a young Irish patriot whom the British had hanged after a sham court martial in 1803, dragged it into a bed of tulips, doused it with lighter fluid, set it alight, and left it there face down. The same thing happened to Lou Costello’s statue in Paterson, New Jersey. Costello’s stand-up routine, “Who’s on First,” was still beloved by millions of older Americans.

What Robert Emmet and Lou Costello had to do with anything, no one could say.

In Venice, California, the disgraced lawyer Michael Avenatti sat dejected on a sofa, watching the chaos on TV. In 2018, Avenatti, a brash, Trump-hating loudmouth, had wanted to run for president himself. Now he was de-horsed, a convicted felon, wearing an ankle monitor, with two more criminal trials ahead. He was out on bail and broke and suspended from the bar. Judge Jim Selna had let him out of jail on a $1 million bail bond and set strict conditions for his release, including banning Avenatti from using the internet. Before his stupendous fall, Avenatti had been a prodigious Twitter user, with nearly a million followers.

Today, Avenatti couldn’t resist. A friend had slipped him a prepaid smartphone.

The Republic is still at risk, Avenatti tweeted. Donald Trump will not go quietly. The courts must do the right thing so that this monster can be removed from the Oval Office . . .

Two hours later, Selna revoked Avenatti’s bail. The marshals knocked roughly at the door. Avenatti had already packed a toothbrush and some underwear. He went quietly.

Late that night in Philadelphia, Joe Biden, doing his best to seem sprightly, strode to a microphone on a stage decorated with masses of American flags. His wife, Jill, stood off to the side, wearing her best politician’s-wife smile. A couple of steps behind Biden, Kamala Harris stood at attention. Trump hadn’t conceded but it was time to declare victory at last. There was no audience, of course, except for a gaggle of masked-up stagehands and campaign staff. A couple of them helped Biden to his mark, made sure his lav mic was on, and receded into the darkened wings.

A makeup artist applied the last touches of pancake to Joe Biden’s kindly wrinkled old face and poofed up the reforested thatch of white hair on top of his head. She walked off, leaving Biden alone at the lectern.

The director counted Biden in.

“Five, four, three, two, . . .”

Biden let a beat go by. He looked straight into the lens, visualizing, pretending the dark glass orb was the eye of a pretty girl at Claymont Academy in 1960 and he was trying to sweet-talk her outside the locker room on a crisp fall night in the middle of a throng of happy fans after a shower and a big win on the football field.

In the little dining room off the Oval, the only light came from the bank of television monitors that splashed reds and blues and whites on everything.

“This guy, Sleepy Joe,” Trump said. “A very low-IQ individual. Does he even know what state he’s in today?”

“The state of confusion,” said Jared Kushner. Everybody laughed except Mark Meadows.

Meadows had always been uncomfortable with suggestions of Biden’s senility. There had been times when he, Meadows, wondered whether Trump was losing his own marbles or would be the first U.S. president to say shithole or douchebag into a hot microphone on live TV.

“I don’t know, sir,” said the chief of staff. “He’s gaffe-prone all right. But he's been pretty steady lately. They don't let him go off the script."

“You watch, Mark,” said the prez. “He’ll put his foot in it at the worst possible moment, forget his wife’s name onstage, something like that.”

During the debates, each man had struggled at times. But Biden had fared badly in the second debate, when asked a question about American policy on China. He spilled water on himself and referred to the Chinese president as Ho Chi Minh and then tried to recover with a Charlie Chan allusion and then a rambling anecdote about his favorite Chinese takeout restaurant in D.C. He was very fond of their kung pao chicken, he said. Trump had rolled his eyes theatrically, playing to the TV audience, as if to say, Charlie Chan? Really?

After it was over, Biden had come offstage to embrace Jill, his wife. As he exited the brightly-lit stage his eyes didn't adjust right away and he grabbed a female stagehand and kissed her on the lips before realizing Jill was a step behind trying to catch up to him. A camera caught Jill’s face just as Biden planted his lips on the startled young woman’s. The camera mercifully cut away just before Jill dropped her head and started weeping.

But that had been in September. This was now.

“My fellow Americans,” Biden began, grandly.

He flashed his reflexive fake pearly smile, a big toothy smile he’d smiled a million times at county fairs and on the Senate floor and on airport tarmacs all over the world.

“Today we stand at the threshold of history, on the brink of a transformation of our beloved America.”

Even when Biden tried to be Churchillian, it sounded canned, like street-corner pol bullshit a second-rate speechwriter had recycled from an old Mike Dukakis speech that the audience had forgotten five minutes after Dukakis gave it in 1988.

“I want to thank my lovely wife, my partner, my best friend. She’s right here by my side, as she has been throughout our marriage.”

Biden made a half-turn toward stage left and extended his arm toward Jill Biden.

A camera man, following the script, pulled back for a wide shot, following Biden’s lead. Jill stood there, happy, proud, ramrod-straight, in a white Brandon Maxwell dress, looking every inch the former model she was, beaming, a reincarnation of Lady Bird Johnson and Pat Nixon and Joan Mondale and Nancy Reagan all rolled into one. Her eyes brimmed with tears of joy and pride.

Joe Biden waited a beat, to let the image sink in for all the good people watching at home and the men and women serving overseas and even that rat bastard Donald Trump.

“My wife, uh . . .”

Joe Biden looked back into the lens, but a deer-in-the-headlights look had replaced the big smile.

The words had been right in front of him, beaming bright from the twin Teleprompters just a few feet away: JILL BIDEN, WITHOUT WHOM THIS SACRED MISSION, THIS PARTNERSHIP THAT UNITES US ALL TODAY, NEVER COULD HAVE HAPPENED. MY INSPIRATION, MY BEACON, MY ROCK.

The screens flickered for a moment. Then the words disappeared, leaving two blank blue screens.

Kamala Harris heard a commotion backstage. The producers and engineers were scrambling and cussing in hoarse angry whispers and trying to get the Teleprompter screens back up.

No problem, Joe thought. A little ad lib, until they get it back up.

In a flash, Biden remembered Bill Clinton had once ad libbed his way through part of the State of the Union address on live TV after the same thing had happened to him. I can do it too.

“She’s been the best partner a fella like me could ever hope for. She’s going to be our new First Lady. I’m talking, of course, about, uh . . .”

Kamala Harris’ own smile had faded too. Harris had long dreaded this moment, when Joe Biden, the future President of the United States, forgot his wife’s name or who the president of Russia was during a major address to the nation even as she was standing right there.

Come on, Joe, you can do it, she thought. Jill. Jill.

Just then, Brian Panish and his team weren’t watching. They were in their offices on Santa Monica Boulevard, putting the finishing touches on their injunction papers. The afterglow of the sunset still lingered just above the horizon, glowing a faint orange through the light brown pall of L.A. smog that hovered just offshore. There was a big TV monitor mounted high on the wall in a conference room. Someone had muted the audio. “JOE BIDEN ELECTED PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,” said the crawl. The faces of Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash, and John King rotated in and out. Their freshly-scrubbed, perfectly made-up faces looked nothing like they had that night in 2016, when they couldn’t hide their dismay and disgust at Hillary Clinton’s shocking defeat. Tonight they all looked happy and content.

Brian Panish had replaced the framed photos mounted on the wall of his office with a giant, floor-to-ceiling whiteboard.  The scrawling which covered it looked like a Bill Belichik game plan written with red and blue Sharpies.  It was a decision tree, the strategy for winning the election in the courts.  Panish had created it over several weeks with the help of a small team of experts and scholars he had hired and paid by the hour at his own expense to educate him on the niceties of constitutional and election law.

Panish pushed the key that triggered the electronic filing of his motion for temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction in the U.S. District Court. This will fry their bacon all right, he thought, echoing a favorite aphorism of his high school football coach.

Panish smiled to himself.  The papers looked good, he thought.  His team of law professors had written drafts loaded with highfaluting jargon and academic mumbo-jumbo.  Panish had distilled it all into his favorite form of legal expression:  plain English in short punchy sentences that were easy to understand whether you were a juror or a federal judge or a bartender in Culver City.

“California’s electoral process is fatally flawed,” said the opening line of Panish’s brief. “The Postal Service has failed to deliver millions of ballots to county registrars. Its illegal strike has idled the engine of American democracy -- the orderly counting of paper ballots which express the will of the voters. Even now, outlaws are destroying trailers loaded with these ballots.

“The Fourteenth Amendment guarantees voters everywhere due process of law and the equal protection of the laws. This guarantee means something in a presidential election. The Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Bush v. Gore taught us that twenty years ago. If that precedent means anything today, it means the court must enjoin California’s secretary of state from declaring a winner in an election whose outcome Americans will never truly know. California’s 55 electoral votes belong to no one.”

At the hearing that Friday, Judge Terry Hatter took the bench at 9 a.m. Across the country, an audience of millions was watching the live feed on the TV networks.

Forty-one years after his ascent to the federal bench in 1979, Hatter, the first African-American to serve as chief judge of the district, remained a formidable presence in the courtroom. One of the last Jimmy Carter appointees still alive and wearing a robe, he still had an agile, curious mind and infinite patience. At an age when many judges had long since died or quit, he still loved cutting the Gordian knot of a vexing legal problem. As he took the bench, everyone was already standing before the bailiff even said, “All rise, please.”

Hatter nodded at the attorneys. Brian Panish rose to take his place at the lectern, but Hatter waved him away.

“I’d like to hear from Mr. Chu first,” said the judge. “Mr. Chu, I think you will have the laboring oar today. The court is inclined to grant the temporary restraining order and set this matter over for an injunction hearing.”

A gasp went up in the courtroom.

“There will be order in the court,” said Hatter, glaring at the gallery over his reading glasses. “Order.”

Hatter now read from a piece of paper. His law clerk had typed it up for the judge and handed it to him back in chambers.

“The court has read all of the papers, and appreciates the speed and energy devoted to this weighty matter by all counsel,” said the judge. “No party disputes that at least four million mail-in ballots have gone astray due to an illegal strike by the employees of the U.S. Postal Service. These ballots may never be recovered and counted. Neither California’s state government, the court, nor the people of this state can have any confidence that the process designed for the orderly selection of California’s electors, and, in turn, the president of the United States, has functioned properly in this instance. Voters have the right to an orderly process. They also have the right to the equal protection of the laws. These rights are at grave risk today.

“The court, as well as your clients, gentlemen, cannot pretend to know the degree to which those rights were violated last Tuesday, nor who is entitled to claim California’s 55 electoral votes.”

Inside Morgan Chu, who now stood at the lectern, a neural alarm went off. Chu waited for the judge to pause so he could interject something, maybe sidetrack the train that was gaining speed and hurtling toward his client’s case, tell Hatter he was wrong and that the federal courts shouldn’t inject themselves into national presidential elections and that Panish’s logic was superficial and flawed. But Terry Hatter didn’t look up at him.

A feeling dawned on Chu that every other lawyer in America had felt at one time or another: whatever he was going to get to say was going to be for the record on appeal and wouldn’t change the judge’s mind. He might as well have been a mannequin standing there. Judge Hatter kept on reading.

“The Secretary of State, Alex Padilla, is hereby enjoined from certifying the results of the election held on November 3, 2020, to the Electoral College or to any other agency or body,” the judge said. “In California, the results of this election are null and void.”

Subtracting California’s 55 electoral votes from Joe Biden’s total of 270 left him with 215, three less than Trump's 218.

No one had won. Not yet.

In the west wing of the White House, there was jubilation. Wild cheers went up in the offices and corridors. They were audible all the way down in the warren of media cubicles in the basement. In the little dining room off the Oval, Trump laughed out loud, something he rarely did.

“Good old Terry Hatter!” he cried. “I love the bastard! That I can tell you!”

Ivanka and Jared came in for hugs, which Trump rarely gave them or anyone. No one seemed to know where the First Lady was.

Mark Meadows kept his gaze on one of the TV monitors. “COURT RULING THROWS PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION INTO HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES,” read the crawl. Wolf Blitzer, Dana Bash, and John King all were trying and failing to conceal the same sadness that had crept into their faces on Election Night in 2016, when Trump had stunned everyone, including himself, by winning the election.

Meadows was thinking ahead. Under the twelfth amendment, each state’s delegation to the House got a single vote, whether it was Rhode Island’s or New York’s. A simple majority, 26 out of 50, would carry the day. Can we get to 26? Meadows wondered. He started dialing his cell phone.

There was precedent for the situation. But no one had been alive when it had last happened, in 1824, when the House had given the White House to John Quincy Adams even after Andrew Jackson had won majorities in the Electoral College and popular vote. There were constitutional law scholars and Harvard law professors who had written thousands of pages about the legal niceties of contingent elections in the House. The footnotes numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Who had time to read them all? Or to watch Alan Dershowitz and Jeffrey Toobin and a hundred other pompous TV lawyers blather on about it on the cable networks?

For the next four weeks, the war for 26 votes in the House of Representatives went on nonstop -- by phone, in person and to hell with masks, by Zoom. 

Copyright © 2020 by Dan Lawton. All rights reserved. 

➽ Dan Lawton is a lawyer and writer in California.

Unprecedented (I)

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