Caliphate

Chapter VIII

No one thought it particularly odd when President Buckman, with the overwhelming support of his party's members in Congress, pushed through a bill making a very large number of crimes, most notably politically motivated homicide, purely federal in jurisdiction. Even many of the remaining Democratic and Republican members of Congress joined in supporting this "Federal Supremacy over Politically Motivated Crimes Act of 2017." Some, to include we must suppose, Montgomery Chamberlain, must have breathed a heavy sigh of relief when political speech was not criminalized.

If so, such sighs of relief were soon proven to be premature. Chamberlain was found in his Ann Arbor apartment, wounded by gunfire and then strangled to death by the sole surviving member of a family lost in the Kansas City attack. The killer, former liberal Democrat and former husband and father of four, Mark Moulas, called the police after the murder to inform them of it, and calmly awaited arrest while contemplating Chamberlain's cooling corpse. He confessed immediately, and never showed a trace of remorse. At the subsequent bench trial, Moulas was found guilty and sentenced to a term of ninety-nine years by the judge.

Though there is not the slightest bit of evidence that either Buckman, or any member of WUA, was complicit in the Chamberlain murder, Moulas was immediately pardoned and released.

This murder was followed by the private killing of two left-leaning Supreme Court justices, half a dozen congressmen, forty-seven newspaper editors, and an amazingly large number of academicians. All the murderers except one was pardoned, and that one was not pardoned only, so it would seem, because his motivation for the killing had been that the academician concerned had been sleeping with the killer's wife.

This was perhaps the only truly original and brilliant bit of domestic statesmanship ever engaged in by Pat Buckman. No one previously had ever suspected that the power of pardon, of executive clemency, was also a power of summary execution…