Jack of Harts

The new President of the United States could not allow Texas to flaunt his authority to arrest the former (Impeached) President’s staffers for extradition to Washington. He also could not allow their arrest of FBI agents to stand. So he ordered the American military to deal with the situation. Fortunately for everyone involved, the majority of the military bases in Texas had unfortunate communications problems and never received the President’s orders. The special teams that traveled aboard black helicopters on federal missions all over America were not so fortunate. They had angered too many local jurisdictions over the decades, and when they moved in to secure the FBI agents, the Texas Rangers ordered them to surrender. When they declined to do so, the Rangers asked their good friends in the Texas State Guard to deal with the situation. The Texas State Guard was happy to oblige.

President (Impeached) Samuel Mateo Lopez returned home to Texas to a greeting he had not expected to find. Texans had voted overwhelmingly to return him to the Presidency, despite the other party declaring him ineligible to run for the position again. That had been expected. What surprised him was that they had gone behind his back and run a stealth campaign for him while he was touring the rest of the nation to support other candidates. He found out on Election Day that they voted to bring him back as Governor of Texas once more. And many of his White House staffers, campaign consultants, and department heads won elections of their own throughout Texas. It was a Texas-sized non-subtle response to the decades-long prison sentences most of them faced thanks to the new federal administration’s many investigations and charges. And when federal law enforcement demanded they be extradited for trial in Washington, Texas gave them another suitably Texan response. “Come and take them. If you have the cojones.”

There has never been any way to go back and fully audit that last election to find out how many people actually voted for Lopez and Freemon, primarily due to the five states that destroyed their ballots. Virginia as an example registered one-third the number of votes as previous Presidential elections, and did not report how many ballots they shredded or deleted due to vandalism. Polling stations in the rural western areas of Virginia had historically low numbers, and even the cities reported a marked decrease in votes over previous years. The final tally was an amazing 95% of registered votes for the incumbent. Later studies concluded that more people actually cast votes than in the previous election, and most voted for the hometown hero Freemon. Estimates and studies of elections in the other four States show similar discrepancies, and of course we have been able to study the ballots in the other elections. Lopez and Freemon would not have won most of them by any measure. They were not bastions of their party or creed, but had the votes for them been registered in the final results most political historians believe they would have won enough States to secure victory against the man who spearheaded their Impeachments. The voters of the time certainly believed so, and there was much protesting when he announced his overwhelming win.