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  “There he is,” said Will as he lowered Skylar and took her by the hand. She had a small backpack, and both kids had a suitcase they’d checked. Will and Skylar walked to meet Ethan, who was standing in front of Delta 322’s baggage carousel.

  Ethan’s hair had grown considerably since Will saw him last, and the matching set of earrings was certainly a new addition to his appearance. Will, who was not authoritarian by any means, immediately frowned at his son’s new look and dour demeanor.

  “Hey, Dad,” Ethan offered unemotionally.

  Will put his arm around his son’s shoulder and tried to hug him, but Ethan recoiled slightly.

  “Happy New Year, son.” Will tried to appear cheerful.

  “Yeah, right,” mumbled Ethan in response. “Couldn’t be any worse than the last two.”

  Ouch.

  Will had learned to push aside Ethan’s snide comments, but he couldn’t ignore them. Each time they saw one another, Will inwardly hoped this would be the time his son set aside the past, glad to see the father who loved him and had been his hero before the incident that changed their lives.

  “I see ours coming, Daddy!” exclaimed Skylar in her usually chipper way. “Frankie bought me the pink one with the pastel flowers. Isn’t it awesome?”

  Will couldn’t help but roll his eyes at the name synonymous with Judas Iscariot, the world’s most famous betrayer. Frankie Scallone had been a member of Will’s unit on Philly SWAT. He later became outed as the man Will’s wife was having an affair with during the height of the scandal.

  “Yeah, baby girl, it sure is,” replied Will. Once again, he had to shake off the natural repercussions of a nasty divorce. He couldn’t fight every small skirmish in an attempt to change the past. He had to rise above it and be glad he got to spend time with his children, something that had been a challenge in the past due to his financial situation.

  His ex-wife had no compunction to withhold his visitation rights over his periodic underpayments of child support. His inability to pay fully, or perform his end of the bargain, as she put it, resulted in contact with the children being limited. Her own selective enforcement of the final divorce decree was not sanctioned by the judge.

  Most likely, if Will hired a lawyer, the court would set her straight. But if he didn’t have the resources to pay child support in full every month, together with extra medical and school expenses that frequently arose, how could he afford to hire an attorney to protect his rights?

  So the formerly happy family tried to find a way to coexist from afar. Will took a new job at Mercedes-Benz Stadium as a member of their enhanced security team. Karen moved on with his former partner, happily cruising to the Caribbean on this New Year’s Eve. And his two kids, one loving and the other not so much, were going to see Beyoncé and Jay-Z in concert while their dad worked.

  Chapter Thirteen

  McPherson Building

  Washington, DC

  Gone were the days when you had to hustle down to the courthouse and file a pleading or brief before the clerk’s office closed at four o’clock. With the advent of modern, sophisticated computers systems and the internet, end of the day meant having your document filed electronically before midnight.

  The clock was ticking toward the proverbial witching hour, and Hayden Blount, the newest partner in the prestigious Washington law firm of Stein, Mitchell, was putting the final touches on the most important legal document she’d created in her career.

  She read it on her computer for the fourth time, constantly tweaking a word here and there, editing the supplemental brief requested by the United States Supreme Court in the matter of The Removal of the President of the United States.

  A chill came over Hayden’s body despite the cozy seventy-two-degree temperature in her office. It was the gravity of the pleading that she was drafting, both for the occupant of the Oval Office and the benefit of future presidents as well.

  Politics was in her blood, although not enough to encourage her to seek public office. She was the descendent of a long lineage of American statesmen dating back to North Carolinian William Blount, a signer of the Constitution and the man who played a leading role in helping Tennessee become a state. The children of William Blount and Mary Grainger went on to become congressmen, judges, and military heroes.

  For Hayden, the Blount family history was something to be proud of, but not necessarily judged by. She planned to make her own way in life. With a drive and passion unparalleled in her peers, she strived for excellence.

  Strikingly attractive and in her mid-thirties, Hayden had been anointed one of DC’s top forty most eligible women on Hinge’s Most Eligible annual list. Driven, powerful, and aloof, she didn’t care anything about being eligible or attractive. She cared about winning, especially when it came to defending those under attack.

  Hayden had been brought on board at Stein, Mitchell for many reasons, including her stellar clerkship for Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. Justice Alito, a Yale grad and Bush appointee, had been on the Court since 2006. After Hayden graduated from Duke Law School with high honors, she chose to join the group of clerks under Justice Alito’s tutelage. She was glad she did.

  The prestige of clerking for a Supreme Court justice could only be surpassed by being appointed to the Court itself. She’d learned the inner workings of the Court and thought processes of the justices, which served her well in preparation of this brief.

  Nothing like this particular issue had been in front of the Court in its history. It came as the result of politics at its worst on all sides of the issue. From the moment this president was declared the victor in his first bid for public office, he came under considerable scrutiny from the media and the half of the country who opposed him. Even some within his party were having buyer’s remorse.

  As a result, his first two years in office swirled in turmoil and rancor. The political divide in America, which had begun decades prior and grew wider during the prior administration, developed into a full-blown chasm over the president’s first term.

  Day after day, with every twenty-four-hour news cycle, a new crisis or accusation beset his presidency. Some questioned the ability of the president to continue under the never-ending barrage he suffered, some of which was deserved, much of which was not.

  As the midterm elections approached in the president’s first term, the Democratic party was poised to make huge gains in Congress. A blue wave was predicted in the House and Senate. However, the wave election never materialized. The president’s party gained seats in the Senate to widen its majority, and the number of losses in the House were far below expectations.

  The confirmation battle surrounding the appointment of Justice Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, considered by most pundits to be a winning argument for the minority party, backfired. It served to rally supporters of the president, but the record turnout resulted in a democratic-controlled House of Representatives.

  The divided Congress served to stymie much of the president’s agenda, and like others before him, he chose to govern through executive orders, directives issued by the president that managed the affairs of government and had the force of law.

  The number of executive orders issued by the president during the second half of his first term troubled members of his own party because of the precedent it was setting, and caused the democrats to scream bloody murder.

  While the battles fought in his first two years in office were largely related to his personal activities and his inarticulate expressions, which were often deemed offensive, in his second two years in office, he was attacked for circumventing Congress. As a result, the federal court system was inundated with litigation in an attempt to curtail the powers of the presidency.

  Despite all of the inside-the-beltway drama that the average American cared little about, the president succeeded in implementing his policies, and he was easily his party’s nominee to seek a second term. On the opposite side of the aisle, a crowded field of thirty-eight vied for the par
ty’s nomination to take on the president in the next election.

  Heavily funded and widely popular among young adults, an obscure Texas congressman, Robert “Beto” O’Rourke, won the democratic nomination. Young, energetic, and seen as the second coming of John F. Kennedy, O’Rourke took on the president, who was nearly thirty years his senior.

  The battle was hard-fought, but thanks to an unusual boost from union workers and African-Americans, the president won a narrow electoral victory, but lost the popular vote for the second time.

  As had been the case in the 2000 and 2004 elections, the final state to announce its results was Florida. Voting machine failures and allegations of absentee-ballot abuse marred the results. Assertions of voter fraud in Nevada placed those election results into the hands of the newly constituted Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which now included Arizona, Nevada, Montana, Idaho, and Alaska. The states of Hawaii, California, Oregon, and Washington were merged into a newly created Twelfth Circuit. The case was still moving its way through the courts as the investigation into the alleged voter fraud continued. It was not expected to alter the outcome of Nevada’s six electoral votes that went to O’Rourke.

  Over the last four years, the president had grown increasingly distrustful of his cabinet and many of his advisors. Repeated leaks to the media were a problem he’d battled since he was first elected. Staffers were known to undermine his authority. Some members of the cabinet openly defied his authority and refused to act upon his executive orders.

  Within those early days after his reelection, there were the whispers. The hushed insinuations that the president was increasingly mentally unstable. That the rigors of office were beginning to cloud his judgment. That he’d circled the wagons so tight around him that only his immediate family was able to provide him counsel. In essence, he’d walled himself in.

  All of the drama surrounding the White House reached a crescendo seven days after the election when Florida certified its vote in favor of the president. The media led the outrage at the methodology followed by the state. Democrats rallied their legal machinery and flooded the Sixth Circuit Federal Courts with legal proceedings using several angles. Even the vice president decried the decision because of the questionable means by which it had been reached.

  The president was fed up with his elections being challenged as illegitimate. When the vice president made his feelings known, he found several allies within the president’s cabinet. The democrats vowed to initiate impeachment proceedings in the House, which they retained, and now those on the fence two years ago were willing to join in. The never-ending string of controversies didn’t end with the election; they were renewed with a new robustness.

  On Veteran’s Day following the election, a letter was delivered to Congress by the vice president, which was signed by a majority of the cabinet. The letter was succinct and to the point.

  To the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives:

  We, the majority of the cabinet of the United States, duly established in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, hereby declare pursuant to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, that the president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office and should be removed from office accordingly.

  If the president hadn’t lost his mind prior to the invocation of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, he certainly did after receiving delivery of the letter to Congress. After his head exploded, figuratively speaking, his first call was to his lead outside counsel at Stein, Mitchell—Pat Cipollone.

  Chapter Fourteen

  McPherson Building

  Washington, DC

  Cipollone called the partners into an emergency meeting to lay out the facts. They created a legal strategy, and then Cipollone, along with Hayden, met at the White House with the president, his chief of staff, and his oldest daughter.

  Since the enactment of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment following the death of President John F. Kennedy, the amendment was only invoked three times. In 1985, President Ronald Reagan sent a letter to then Vice President George H. W. Bush to perform his duties while he underwent surgery to remove cancerous polyps from his colon.

  President George W. Bush invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment twice during his presidency as a result of colon-related procedures. In both cases, Vice President Dick Cheney acted as president during those brief colonoscopies.

  There had never been a discussion of using the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to remove a sitting president as a means of changing the occupant of the White House, until now.

  Cipollone was personally outraged at the thought of removing the president for the publicly stated reason that the cabinet disapproved of his leadership style, which was deemed impetuous, adversarial, petty, and ineffective. To the senior partner and head of the president’s legal team, such action could precipitate a constitutional crisis. Yet this issue was what the legal minds at Stein, Mitchell faced.

  The firm quickly drafted a letter in response and it was delivered to Congress. Rather than litigating the matter in the court of public opinion or provide details of their legal position in the letter, they simply denied the charge with three simple words—no inability exists.

  The procedural move would result in the matter being sent to Congress for a series of hearings and votes, during which time the vice president and the cabinet members would state their case. They never got the chance.

  What happened next would go down in American history. The day after the president’s response letter was acknowledged as received, he called an emergency meeting of his cabinet at the White House. Some refused to attend, but twelve members, plus the vice president, were in attendance.

  The president, flanked by Cipollone and his chief of staff, calmly said the words that had made him famous during his long-running reality television show, The Apprentice. One by one, he said, “You’re fired!”

  It was labeled in the media as the bloodletting, a word that typically was used in conjunction with the surgical removal of a patient’s blood to prevent or cure illnesses and disease. In this case, the patient, the president’s administration, was bitterly divided and in need of change. When the brief, eight-minute meeting was over, only four loyal members of his cabinet remained, and the rest were escorted out of the White House by the Secret Service.

  That was when the legal battle began.

  The matter was now before the Supreme Court to determine whether the president had the authority to fire most of his cabinet and, as a result, circumvent the Twenty-Fifth Amendment as invoked by the prior members of the cabinet.

  Hayden was tasked with writing the supplemental brief requested by the Court. She drew upon her knowledge of the justices and their individual points of view. Case precedent didn’t help one side or the other, as this was clearly a matter of first impression.

  After the president appointed new members to his cabinet and submitted the name of a new vice president to replace the one whose resignation he’d accepted, the dynamics changed. Hayden argued that the proceedings should be stopped because the fired cabinet members no longer fit the Twenty-Fifth Amendment’s requirements for principal officers who could discharge the president. Only the new cabinet members and the vice president had standing to bring such a declaration, and they were handpicked loyalists to the president.

  It was an interesting legal maneuver that had not been anticipated by the fired group, but it still would require litigation. The president’s goal was to make it to Inauguration Day without the matter being resolved, at which time he felt cooler heads would prevail.

  Hayden and her firm believed the president had an absolute right to clean house, as it were. This narrow issue would be litigated first, and the briefs were to be filed by New Year’s Eve. Next Friday, the Court, while in conference, would take up the writs of certiorari filed on both sides, to take up the rulings of the DC Circuit. While the Court was not under an obligation to hear those cases, it usually did if it was necessary to ha
rmonize conflicting opinions within the Circuits, or if it was a matter of national significance, which this naturally was.

  The Court had requested a supplemental brief on the matter dealing with the specifics of Hayden’s argument that the president had unfettered authority to remove any member of his cabinet, with or without cause. Her opponents argued that the president was effectively deemed incapacitated at the time the cabinet invoked the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, thereby rendering his powers limited until a full hearing in Congress.

  Against that backdrop, while the rest of her firm shared New Year’s Eve libations in the large conference room, Hayden toiled over the fate of a president.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Atlanta International Airport

  Delta Flight 322

  Either you control destiny, or destiny controls you. His father-in-law’s deep, gravelly voice echoed in his ears as he gazed at the holiday passengers scurrying back and forth in front of him. Cort was in a trance, one that had overtaken him several hours ago in Washington and left him realizing he had very little recollection of departing a snowy Reagan National Airport only to arrive at Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta a couple of hours later.

  A continuous barrage of announcements from airport personnel tried to invade his head as he recalled his father-in-law’s words, which consumed him by the power of their meaning—if he only knew what they meant.

  “If you are in the gate area and an originating passenger of Delta Flight 322 connecting from Philadelphia to Mobile, we ask that you retake your original seats on board the aircraft now. We apologize for the delay, but we are going to begin boarding the flight to make a determination on our standby passengers. Thank you.”

  Cort leaned back in his seat to narrowly avoid a teenage boy who was engaging in horseplay with a younger girl, most likely his sister. They’d joined a number of passengers who’d departed the Delta flight from Philadelphia, and he hoped that provided a seat for him.