Oh, God, this jackwagon. I don’t even like this guy, too much.
Nobody looked happy, and that included all the people who Norm had quietly pegged as having a bug up their ass for all this reforming crap. Which made sense, because everybody here was a F-SOB first, and what they were hearing wasn’t good news for any of them. Politics was one thing; mandatory overtime was something else.
“I’m sure you all saw the squirt this weekend,” Regional Director Becky Chin announced, the grit in her voice making it clear how well she was taking the news. “The Garner state legislature approved the amendment. So that’s three-fourths. That’s the ballgame. Hope you all enjoyed your weekend, because from this point on all unnecessary leave is canceled. Yeah, Norm?”
Norm lowered his hand. “I know what you mean by ‘unnecessary,’ but we got new people here. You should really drive it home for them.”
Becky laughed, which is what Norm wanted. She was a pretty good boss. “Sure, Norm. You can get married, people. You can have a kid, personally. You can die. Everything else, let me just tell you ‘no’ now and get it out of the way. This comes all the way down from President Granger himself. We’re on a time crunch, and I wish I had given this briefing last week.”
She tapped her smartboard, and everybody else’s chimed in response. “Forty new Senators, eighty-five new Congresscritters, and we won’t know who the Hell any of them are until November.” A slight ripple of — something — went through the room. Norm figured it was apprehension and anticipation, mixed.
An *expanded* Congress?
Going right back into Horror, I see. 😉
Nah, it’s a reform. They let in all the Mexican and Caribbean states with only one-half the number of Senators and two-thirds the number of Congressmen, thanks to the new Constitution that the Old Man rammed through the USNA while it was still firmly a dictatorship*. Since Congress under the Old Man was a rubber-stamp anyway, it didn’t matter. But now that the elections are back to being fair and the government doesn’t appoint Senators directly, well… there were political benefits in bringing the Expanded States fully into the fold.
Besides, it’s not like any of them were *Canadians*.
*It’s transitioning back to a representative government, complicated by the fact that all the people who liked the old system got sent to Jefferson as involuntary colonists. The people running the USNA at the time of this story are only now realizing just how stupid that was, particularly since all those transportees how show little interest in going back to Earth.