Lunge and parry. Lunge and parry.
Landon Meyer felt a yawn rising, and forced it down. To the millions of viewers watching the confirmation hearing of Judge Phillip Sanford, Landon knew he appeared serious and senatorial, even presidential.
In fact, he was bored.
“May I have another five minutes, Mr. Chairman?”
Landon looked down the curving dais at Democratic senator Andrea Quick and nodded.
“With no objection.”
The seventy-year-old Quick fixed her eyes on Judge Sanford. Her coiffed hair was as frozen in place as her belittling stare.
“Let me understand where your argument takes you, Judge.”
Sanford gazed up at Quick; his elegant features and earnest expression had been a form of armor no other Democrat had been able to penetrate.
Landon smiled to himself. Jimmy Stewart couldn’t have appeared more wholesome and invincible; then his internal smile faded as he wondered why there were no actors like that anymore, nor even an America like the one Stewart lived in. But then he felt a wave of uncertainty, wondering whether that old America could be restored by someone as young as Sanford, experienced in law, but not in life.
“Doesn’t your free speech argument lead us down a road toward the eventual overturn of entirety of McCain-Feingold and every other piece of legislation restricting corporate contributions directly to political candidates and-”
“Madam Senator-”
Quick wagged a finger at Sanford. “Don’t interrupt me, young man.”
Sanford’s face reddened, then he grinned like a schoolboy trying to deflect a teacher’s discipline.
“I was about to say…” Quick reddened, too, then stiffened.
Landon watched the slow recognition sweep across the room that Sanford had derailed her train of thought.
Quick scanned the notes her staff had prepared.
Lunge and parry, Landon said to himself. Lunge and parry.
“With all due respect, Madam Senator, I’m not sure it’s appropriate for me to comment on a matter that may come before the Court.”
Sanford had rescued her from the embarrassing moment by suffocating the issue, and everyone in the audience and watching on television or online had recognized it also.
By Landon’s count, it had been the twenty-third time he’d executed that question-strangling ma-neuver.
Landon understood the confirmation hearing wasn’t about Sanford alone. It was also about how effectively the Democrats could take shots at President Duncan. For them, Sanford was both a nominee to be defeated and a surrogate to be whipped, but so far the rawhide had been missing its target and snapping back into the Democrats’ faces.
But, in a way, Landon felt as though the whip’s popper was just missing him or maybe just pricking him, for it reminded him of an internal tension that had vibrated within him since college. Was the conservatism he believed in composed of tradition or of ideology? Was he an Edmund Burke defending what the country had been and therefore what must be, or a Thomas Hobbes creating a Leviathan out of the chaos of competing wills and constraining everyone for their own safety? Was he a man who believed that the American was at heart a yeoman farmer who should be left to plow his fields as he pleased, or was he a man who believed Americans were merely impulse-driven juveniles whose lives-from their bedrooms to their doctors’ offices-must be monitored and managed?
Landon knew who Brandon wanted to be, but in the twinges of conscience he sometimes felt, he wondered about himself.
He thought of the summer intern who’d misunderstood his biblical reference to the Leviathan, and now wondered whether he’d somehow misunderstood it, too.
Quick looked up from her notes.
“Is there anything that might not come before the Court, anything you feel you are free to comment on?”
Sanford displayed a bland smile and shook his head.
“I’m sorry to say, Senator, we live in a litigious society.”
W here do we stand?” Brandon Meyer asked his brother as they sat in Landon’s office in the Dirksen Building.
The Senate Judiciary Committee had just completed a party-line vote to send Sanford and Heller’s nominations to the full Senate.
Brandon had flown to Washington to meet with members of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“About seven Democrats are only pretending to be undecided,” Landon said. “And we have two of ours who are truly sitting on the fence. They’re not sure whether they can buy their way back from an affirmative vote.”
“So they’ve got fifty against and we’ve got forty-eight in favor. If we can swing our two, then we’re at fifty-fifty and the vice president breaks the tie.”
“It won’t be pretty,” Landon said, “but it’ll be done.”
Brandon examined his tally sheet lying on the edge of Landon’s desk, then asked, “How much more will it take to bring over those last two?”
“There’s a prior question,” Landon said. “How do we get it to them?”
“You just tell me what they need. I’ll figure out the rest.”