I realized I needed a more articulated look at how bad the USNA got before it started getting fixed, so I decided to write up the last President of the USA, and the first one of the USNA. The Old Man. You will not like him, although I will grant that at least he took full advantage of the transportee system to exile his enemies, opponents, and inconvenient groups, instead of killing them.
As long as they were… normal.
The Old Man
Trevor Castaigne Lewis, 2020-2102
Representative (MA-03, Dynamic Party), US House of Representatives, 2055-2079
Speaker of the House, 2069-2079
President of the United States of America, 2079-2085
President of the United States of North America, 2085-2102
Trevor Lewis was born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, on April 23, 2020. Raised in an old Massachusetts family of some but not excessive wealth, he attended Boston University, graduating with a BA in Political Science in 2042. Served in the US Air Force as a JAG, 2042-2052. Honorably Discharged, with the rank of Major.
He ran in Massachusetts’ Third District on the new Dynamic Party ticket in 2054, winning election in a plurality. Ironically, Major Lewis owed his first election to the help of the Dynamic Party faction that later became the True Gaian extremist group, but had fallen out with them by the time of his first re-election.
He served in the House for twelve terms as a Representative, and five terms as Speaker of the House until the 1-23 attacks. The successful use of weapons of mass destruction on Congress left Lewis as the highest ranking official in the government, although he resisted taking the Oath of Office as President until March of 2079, when the death of Vice President Anthony Ramierez finally required him to take the position. Officially, Lewis had been holding out hope that Ramierez would awaken from his coma; later historians would conclude that the new President preferred the freedom of ruling by decree.
Those historians inevitably made their conclusions from the Jefferson colony world, because the new President moved quickly from the beginning to concentrate all power in the executive. Lewis used the excuse of the True Gaian atrocities to detain every radical environmentalist he could find, shipping them en masse to the Bolivar colony world on any excuse, or none. In this he was supported by surviving politicians from the Columbian Party, who shed no tears over the thought of violent or just unpleasant extremists being permanently exiled offworld.
The Columbians also tacitly endorsed Lewis’s intervention in the Canadian civil war of 2079, although the vote to actually annex the country was closer – and, again, hampered by the federal government’s desultory efforts to call for new elections for slain members of Congress. One exiled Columbian Senator admitted later to Jeffersonian researchers that she expected that it would just be useful fodder for the 2080 Presidential election.
The Columbian Party did not participate in that election on a national level.
On February 29, 2080, elements of the new Liberty Corps (later to be renamed the People’s Liberty Corps) detained Columbian party elected officials, and their families, and their staffs, and their families, and so forth. By March 3rd every one of them was irrevocably on a colony ship to Jefferson, leaving President Lewis to gravely explain to the country that he had been forced to let them flee, rather than have the country face destruction. Their own radicals had taken control of tactical nuclear warheads, you see. Columbian fanatics had even set off two of them, in thankfully low-population areas; and while brave Liberty Corps operatives had managed to keep even more nukes from detonating, the situation was starkly and dangerously unstable. Eventually a compromise was made: the Columbian leadership would be allowed to emigrate to Jefferson, in exchange for no reprisals, and the surrendering of the remaining bombs.
Lewis had it all: documentary evidence, video confessions, and even the nukes themselves. Given that the world was fully in the grips of the horribly brutal Consolidation Wars, it was not actually difficult to sell this to the American voting public. Or more accurately the American public, since voting was about to become a somewhat vestigial civic duty for a while.
I don’t like his methods, but I can respect his ambition for conquest. I too look north (or south when I return to Detroit) and consider whether it would be worth the hassle to liberate the poor, oppressed Canadians.