Chapter 5

The White House counsel, a seasoned lawyer in her own right, turned to Attorney General Bernard and stared in disbelief.

“Wait, you’re going to do what?!”

“I am going to issue a memo to the heads of the Federal district courts around the country telling them to summarily and without comment dismiss any court cases that are filed challenging the ... whatever this is going to be called, due to the coming declaration of National Emergency that will be signed and in force, on the basis of national interests and security,” Grace Bernard said quietly. “There is precedence for this. In the 2025 Constance Et Al v. the U.S. Government case, SCOTUS ruled that it was legal to summarily halt all actions against the National Mask Mandate in the face of the Reaper virus. And that is just one of three SCOTUS cases that support doing this.”

Bernadette Philips, the lawyer to the President, nodded her head slowly. In that ruling, the high court held that in a declared national emergency that was approved by both houses of Congress, such an order was legal and fully enforceable. SCOTUS had held that any action that forced a delay in implementing the National Mask Mandate was tantamount to sentencing potentially hundreds of thousands of people to death while the legal wrangling was settled. The ruling allowed that fully declared and supported national emergencies, and the exigencies of protecting the population in the face of a very deadly pathogen, were fully supported by the emergency powers in the founding papers normally granted during wartime but also supported during grave threats to the nation.

While there was a lot of disagreement on the need during the Covid-19 pandemic, and justifiably so in Bernadette’s opinion from the vantage of hindsight, everyone but a very small, very vocal, and very wealthy minority of extremely conservative political actors who had funded the legal challenges to the emergency powers during the Covid-19 pandemic, held out during the early days of the Reaper pandemic, demanding that their constitutional freedom to not be forced to wear a mask during the pandemic be recognized.

SCOTUS had taken a particularly hard line with the opposition in this case, establishing the precedence that the declaration of a national emergency by a duly elected President, and backed by confirmation from both houses of congress, could set aside constitutional rights as needed to protect the population as a whole from “those whose misguided beliefs could cause sufficient disruption of actions meant to safeguard the people as a whole, thereby putting others at risk of grave injury and/or loss of life.”

Partially, it was because there was an analysis that showed that enough casualties in critical roles in the governance of the country, as well as critical infrastructure such as food, water, power, energy, and emergency services, could cause irreparable harm to the people those services were supporting.

But later, after the ruling, it was reported that Justice Elena Kagan, who wrote the unanimous opinion for the court, had made a statement at a private meeting that made it clear she was not going to waste time repeatedly going back to revisit the issue “every time some knuckle-dragging neanderthal decides his right to swing his fist does not end at the tip of my nose, but much further beyond,” paraphrasing Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr, the associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1800s.

“I am not so sure that Justice Kagan would support this. She was a very big believer in women’s rights. Setting up a system that will take away the rights of young to middle-aged women to even live, let alone be cut up after death and become food for others, seems like something she might have a few words about.”

“Actually, I had a conversation with her about this a few days ago, with the President’s approval, I might add,” Attorney General Grace Bernard said dryly. “I explained the inevitable result of where we will end up if we don’t do something very drastic and soon. I then proceeded to shoot down every approach she suggested to dealing with the problem, using the statistics and facts assembled by the Chinese, no less. She then asked me if we had a plan to deal with it, so I laid it out for her.

“To say she was shocked and upset would be a vast, massive, epic understatement. When she finally stopped swearing and cursing me out after nearly twenty minutes, she was quiet for nearly a half hour while she thought about it. Then after cursing me out again for another five minutes, she spent hours asking me a lot of questions, trying to find holes in the logic. I don’t think I have ever been grilled like that before, nor will I ever again, I tell you. Even at her age of one hundred and eleven years, she has lost none of her wits, and her tongue is sharper than it has ever been.” Grace shook her head at the memory.

“The meeting ran almost four hours long. Close to the end of it, she turned to me and said, ‘I know this was not your idea. Where the hell did this come from?’ That brought up the Chinese situation, and that they are already doing this, which horrified her. But her logical side ... well, I don’t think you can say it won out. She just ran out of options and arguments against it, and conceded there was no other way without cannibalism, unless we wanted to kill one out of every six females on their eighteenth’s birthday, which may end up not being enough anyways. We don’t really know, because the birth rates are going to go up no matter what we do as women quest for baby boys to protect themselves from being selected.”