AMENDMENT X
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
Chris had always fancied himself a reasonably politically-savvy person. After all, he resided in Washington, hobnobbed with the legal élite, and socialized with the one or two Congressmen whose ideas he thought were worth hearing out. Even if he had never in his life had any desire to touch elected office, Chris had gone into this whole process convinced that he could navigate the Senate with relative ease on his own. How difficult could it be, really?
And then he met Lisa Wolfe, who proved over and over just how incompetent Chris was at this whole politicking game.
"NO!" Lisa barked at some hapless low-level staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, shoving a schedule back into her hands and sending her scurrying away with her cheeks flushing bright red in humiliation. "No, we are not scheduling Judge Mulready back-to-back with the Senators from Massachusetts and Oregon tomorrow morning. Christ, am I the only one here who understands that this is not supposed to be a freaking suicide mission?"
"With all due respect," Chris interjected, "I think I can withstand the pressure of two consecutive hostile audiences with enough grace to..."
"With all due respect, Your Honor, you can't, because that's not even the issue." Lisa shook her head, scowling. "You're not meeting with either of them this week. Period. Lyndell's chief of staff is openly gay and has made no secret of his desire to disembowel you over Bellington. We go in there before you've won the public support of at least one other Senator who's put gay rights at the top of his agenda, and you're toast. And Leung's been pissed at you for the past six months, for that speech that you gave in which you suggested that Asians no longer be considered a suspect class. You need to get one or both of the Hawaiʻian Senators on your side before you can even think about talking to her office, and believe me, getting a thumbs-up from anyone in Honolulu is gonna be a struggle in and of itself."
"So...?"
"Let me think."
Lisa held up her hands and exhaled slowly, her gaze focused downwards at the surface of her desk.
"Shit," she muttered to herself. "OK, Mindy, call White's office, see if we can get Judge Mulready in for a ten o'clock tomorrow morning. She's not gonna slam him quite as hard as Yamada would on the suspect classification issue, for obvious reasons. Maybe Reyes, too, for eleven; New Mexico's still a light enough blue that we can probably get a statement of support without too much difficulty. And... Shapiro. No, scratch that, Franco. Not ideal, but less likely to skewer our man on gay rights than Shapiro or Lyndell are, at any rate. Sometime tomorrow afternoon, I don't care when. What time is it?"
"Ten 'til," Chris answered, glancing at the clock on the wall just over Lisa's head.
Lisa swore again.
"OK, we're outta here," she called to her staff. "Mitchell, Davies, and, last but definitely not least, everyone's favorite, the esteemed Senator from Rhode Island. Get that revised schedule for me by the time we're back."
The first two meetings were as easy as Chris had expected they would be – softball questions from two Republican Senators on the Judiciary Committee who had loudly voiced their support for his nomination only hours after its occurrence. The visits were really little more than photo-ops, but Chris still appreciated that Lisa was giving him a break this morning, especially given what was up ahead.
"You ready for this?" Lisa muttered to him as they charged through the hallways of the Russell Senate Office Building.
"As ready as I suspect I'll ever be," Chris replied. He had reread Roland Pierce's official biography that morning and was familiar enough with his positions on a variety of issues as the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, but considering Lisa's tone, Chris was beginning to wonder if he was grossly underestimating the actual extent to which Pierce hated him.
"I hope that's true," Lisa grumbled, her heels clacking militantly on the marble floors. "Your nomination lives and dies with this next meeting, Judge Mulready, and I'm not saying that to sound melodramatic. You've already hit a low point amongst the Democrats on this committee with Bellington and your book, so gird your loins, and please, please don't give Pierce any more reason to hate you. Who knows, maybe you can somehow make him forget how much he already does."
Their crew rounded a corner and ran straight into their liberal counterparts.
"Josh Lyman," Lisa said with an almost predatory leer as Josh awkwardly scooted from side to side in an effort to avoid running into her. "We meet yet again."
"Yeah," frowned Josh, clearly frazzled. "Really, really looking forward to all of this being over."
Lisa raised an eyebrow.
"You truly know how to charm a girl and keep her affections, don't you," she said sardonically.
"How are things going?" Evie asked Chris in a low voice.
"Mitchell and Davies this morning. So far, so good, but I'm about to be thrown into the lion's den. You?"
"Just met with Arnie Vinick. Nice guy, and surprisingly moderate, but what else would you expect from a California Republican. Who's in the lion's den?"
"Roland Pierce. And, if I survive, I then have to go convince a couple of Hawaiʻians and an Oregonian that I don't hate Asians."
Evie smirked.
"You don't need to look so amused, Evie."
"I'm sorry, Chris, but considering that the first major application of strict scrutiny to a racial classification was in Korematsu..."
"But society has changed significantly since World War II, and Asians are now very successful academically and financially, compared to other racial minority groups."
"But that doesn't mean that discrimination doesn't still exist, nor that all Asian American communities benefit from the same privileges in equal measure..."
"Judge Lang," Josh Lyman interrupted, "my apologies, but we should get going."
"Ah." Evie seemed to deflate just a little bit. "Well, good luck with the charm offensive, at any rate, Chris."
"Where are you off to now?"
"Malkin." Evie smiled grimly. "Followed by Webster. Ought to be a fun little outing with the Senators from Virginia. I have the pleasure of meeting with Senator Millbank afterwards, if Drori hasn't already lost me the nomination by then, and I hear that his reaction to my nomination was the word 'no' five times in a row, which I don't believe was a show of support cryptically voiced as a misquote of King Lear."
"I see."
"Judge Mulready?" Lisa commanded.
The thing was, Chris really did see, and what he saw was that Evie was as understandably panicked as he was. There was no way that her nomination could survive being slammed over Drori, just as there was no way that his could survive the wrath of all of the Democratic Senators incensed by Bellington and America's Democrats: The Triumph of Socialism and everything in between. He knew damn well that he didn't want to have to walk into Roland Pierce's office alone, and while Chris didn't gamble on principle, he would have bet anything in that moment that Evie Lang felt the same way about the Virginians.
"Judge Mulready, we're going to be late."
Evie flashed him a fatalistic smile and turned to follow Josh Lyman, who was sporting an equally dismal expression.
"Wait," said Chris, "I'm coming with you."
Evie stopped in her tracks and slowly turned back to face Chris, her eyes filled with disbelief and wonder.
"Excuse me?" Lisa said, unimpressed.
"Please let Senator Pierce know that I'm very sorry, but I'll have to postpone my meeting with him," Chris explained, stepping forward to stand beside Evie.
"What are you doing?" she whispered to him.
"Trying to make sure that at least one of us survives this preliminary round of hazing," he muttered back.
"Your Honor," sighed Lisa, clearly on the verge of losing her temper, "We don't have time for this..."
"But, fortunately, I do," Evie cut in. "My meetings with Senators Malkin and Webster don't start for another half hour, and I'd be delighted in the interim to accompany Judge Mulready to Senator Pierce's office."
Lisa Wolfe's jaw dropped slightly.
"What..." Josh sighed impatiently, arms akimbo. "No, Judge Lang, that's really not going to do anything helpful for your nomination..."
"On the contrary, I can't think of anything that would be more constructive for our nomination," replied Evie. "Maybe I can't change Senator Pierce's mind regarding Judge Mulready's less conciliatory writings, but I can at least show my support by being there for him."
"And, conversely, Senators Malkin and Webster certainly won't back down on their concerns regarding Judge Lang's judicial record, but at least they'll know that I'm with her," Chris added.
"Isn't this why you came up with this whole idea, in the first place?" Evie asked Josh. "The deal was that Chris and I would be nominated together, with the assumption that we would be confirmed together, as well. Why wouldn't you want to strengthen the odds of that happening? If we stand with each other before the Senators who we know will be the toughest sells on one side or the other, it's a win for everybody."
The scowl on Lisa's face made it quite clear that she thought otherwise, but Josh sighed, clearly resigned.
"OK, fine, but please keep it to half an hour," he begged. "A little less, if possible, so we can get from Hart to Dirksen in time."
"Now can we go?" asked Lisa pointedly, and she began charging down the hallway again, Josh stalking dejectedly in her wake and mumbling something about the independence of the judiciary.
Evie glanced at Chris, and the two set off after their handlers.
"Thank you for that moment of chivalry back there," Evie said.
"It seemed unreasonable to leave the fate of your nomination in the hands of two angry Virginians." Chris shrugged. "Not even the staunchest defender of states' rights can argue against a federal appellate judge's mandate to interpret the law as she sees fit and expect the states within her jurisdiction to adhere to that ruling, however misguided that interpretation was," he added, his voice gently mocking.
"It's a good thing we're almost at Pierce's office, or I might have retracted my show of solidarity right then and there," Evie riposted, and then sighed. "Chris, I can't guarantee that my being in the room with you will make the Senator any less aggressive."
"And likewise, re Malkin and Webster, but it's still worth a shot."
"Well, it'll be an interesting trial run. There's no way they'll put us on the same panel for the hearings themselves, of course, but at least this takes a bit of pressure off of this round of questioning."
"We can sit in the front rows of each other's hearings, and glower at any Judiciary Committee members who start getting too pushy."
Evie laughed.
"The way I see it, it's all a matter of reminding them that we're a package deal," she joked. "Both or nothing. Two sides of the same coin. Or, as my husband would put it, equal and opposite forces that balance each other. We'll get through this together."
Ahead of them, Josh Lyman turned a corner, and then quickly doubled back.
"Reporters up ahead, waiting outside Pierce's office," he warned them. "And the sight of the two of you waltzing around to these meetings together is only going to turn the next few days into even more of a media feeding frenzy than it already would have been. You ready for this?"
The two judges met each other's eyes, smiling. After all, no one was ever truly ready to be suddenly catapulted from a life of relative normalcy into the celebrity and notoriety of sitting on the highest court in the land. No one could anticipate precisely the burdens of the position, or the frustrations, or the joys. Both Evie and Chris knew that, if all went as planned, they would spend the rest of their professional lives waging an intense and extremely public war of ideas in which they were the rival commanders – exulting in their legal victories, castigating each other bitterly in their extraordinary dissents, painting the future of American jurisprudence for years to come with stroke after bold stroke of soaring rhetoric underpinned by sound reasoning. It only could ever work because they were so perfectly matched: so equally opposed, and yet so astonished and delighted by each other's intellectual brilliance and abiding love for the law. And yet they both were unflinchingly certain that it would work, and that their ideological dichotomy could only make the Supreme Court a stronger and better institution. In light of that conviction, how could they not be ready?
"Your Honors?"
Josh Lyman was still waiting for them. Chris gestured for Evie to take the lead, but she shook her head.
"To take a leaf out of the Chief Justice's book and quote the Bard, now let's go hand in hand, not one before another," she insisted.
And with that, Evelyn Baker Lang and Christopher Mulready walked side by side around the corner and into the view of the press, ready to face together whatever trials awaited them ahead.
Author's Note: Well, that's that, but if you've enjoyed and want more of the same, please do stay tuned for a sequel series about Evie and Chris's relationship on the Court. (There are still 17 more amendments to go, after all!) And thank you very much for reading, which goes without saying.