There were pockets of Limas in some rural parts of the new state. Patriots weren’t the only ones who went out to the country, grouped up, and fought. A handful of Lima bands did, too. One of them was on Hartstine Island, the location of the first cabin Grant looked at and almost bought. Grant always had a bad vibe about that place, especially with all the libs who lived out there. He knew his instinctual reaction was right when he learned that those libs invited their Lima friends over to stay.
The Limas out on Hartstine Island became pirates, real life twenty-first century pirates. No eye patches or parrots, but they attacked ships and stole and killed. They used Hartstine Island, which became known as “Pirate Island,” to stage their raids. It took Joe Tantori’s men, “Tantori’s Raiders” as they became known, landing on the north and south ends of the island and driving an armored car down the only road on the island to clean out that place. Joe lost a dozen men, most of them Marines. Gunnery Sergeant Martin Booth was one of them.
Police departments were cleaned up in New Washington. The majority of the former cops were decent. They had left their departments as the Collapse approached, like Rich Gentry. The ones still on active duty during the war were the problem. After the Patriots took over, most police forces fired or arrested all the active duty cops and replaced them with former cops and new recruits. They used lots of citizen posses, too. In Frederickson, Sheriff Bennington was an example of what was happening all across New Washington.
Crime was a big problem when the Patriots took over. People were hungry and saw that police forces were stretched thin. You didn’t rob someone in a gang’s territory; that was the exclusive privilege of each gang. The newly re-constituted local police forces concentrated on street crimes and didn’t focus too much on rounding up Limas.
The State Guard was doing that. Well, not technically the State Guard. Having the military enforcing civilian laws is a bad idea everywhere in the world it has been tried. Early leaders of America knew this and therefore passed the Posse Comitatus Act, which outlawed the military from enforcing civilian laws. The FUSA government repealed the Posse Comitatus Act before the Collapse, but the Interim Legislature in New Washington, and other newly free states, reinstated it. So, technically, the State Guard military units that once hunted Limas were deactivated and turned into state police units. Same guns, same ranks, same everything, just not a military unit. Because the Patriots were nervous about a militarized police force, they limited the commissions given to the new state police officers to six months. They could be renewed, but on a case-by-case basis. Besides, most State Guard enlistments were only a year, so six months or so of training and military fighting around the New Year’s offensive, and then six months of policing, usually finished out an enlistment. Most State Guardsmen were glad to be done with their stint after a year. They had families to get back to and the economy was rebounding.
That was because, at least for that first year, there were no taxes or regulations on commerce. None. Every law had been repealed. Business exploded. No more permits, licenses, environmental studies, or even taxes. That’s right: no more taxes. The Interim Government repealed all of them. They couldn’t collect them even if they wanted to; people were feeding themselves and that was about it. What would the new government, the freedom-loving Patriots, do? Seize a family’s food as “taxes.” That wasn’t the Patriot way.
The Interim Government basically ran on donations and captured goods. There was so little government that it wasn’t hard to do so. The only significant expense was the State Police. Donations were informal. Much like the Grange had just fed guards in Pierce Point, citizens who had extra food fed the security forces. Donations weren’t enough to live on, but they did help a lot.
The Interim Government primarily ran captured supplies. Limas’ property was seized with a judge overseeing things, but most of the Limas just took off to Seattle or elsewhere and there was no one there to claim the property. Seized Lima property supplied the State Police with food, ammunition, and fuel, which was about all they needed. Things were so broken down that the necessities were all people had or used.
Seized Lima houses, called “guesthouses,” were used temporarily by Interim Government officials. Grant used a seized Lima house in Olympia as his “guesthouse,” while his real house in Olympia was on a long list waiting to be repaired after Nancy Ringman trashed it.
The plan for after the elections was for the Legislature to pass very, very low taxes and cap them in the new Constitution. By capping taxes to a small percentage of the state’s gross domestic product, government could never grow like it did in the past. Yet, at the same time, government would have enough money to only do the one thing it was supposed to do: protect individual liberties. That was it. This was a shock to most people: the new government would only protect individual liberties. This wasn’t just the right thing to do; it was all that could be done. The New Washington government didn’t have enough resources to do anything else. Good.
“Critical industries” were another economic solution used by the Legislature after the interim period of no taxes and regulations expired. Industries essential to an economically independent and prosperous state, like agriculture, manufacturing, energy, and natural resources, were designated “critical industries,” which meant the government got the hell out of their way. The taxes and regulation did not return for these industries. Software, filling out government forms, and making lattes were not “critical industries” in New Washington.
Manufacturing, farming, fishing, and logging took off overnight. There were plenty of good jobs and lots of products. Prices were reasonable because there wasn’t layer upon layer of taxes and regulation artificially driving up the price.
In the southern and western states, which had broken away from the FUSA and were having booms of their own, domestic energy production shot up. Gasoline from there was plentiful and cheap in New Washington. And no more wars in the Middle East to fight, at least not with Americans fighting them, because the need for oil was gone. Grant would shake his head and wonder why in the world this hadn’t been done sooner.
New Washington rebuilt infrastructure much differently than the old state had done it. New Washington did it much more cheaply after the repeal of “prevailing wage” laws that ensured unions got all work, and the repeal of the layers and layers of complete overkill environmental regulations. And, of course, New Washington contracted out almost all of the work. There was now transparent and fair contracting; no inside deals. Total and complete disclosure of everything about the contracting. Corruption in contracting carried the death penalty. The past theft by contractors for the old state would not be tolerated.
Civil liberties were a huge part of the plan. Not “civil liberties” in the ACLU sense of the term, which they turned into meaning a “right” to welfare. No, real civil liberties, which meant protecting individual liberties, all the time, not just when it served a political agenda.
The New Washington government’s “plan” for civil liberties was extremely simple: follow the Constitution. Grant would laugh when people asked him if such a simple plan could work. He would ask them, “How did the Limas’ ‘sophisticated’ plans work out?”
A very good constitution to follow already existed. As good as the United States Constitution was, the old Washington State Constitution was actually better. Written in 1889, it had all the good stuff from the 1789 U.S. Constitution, but a hundred years of more wisdom in it. The old Washington State Constitution had amazing rights in it, but they were never actually followed by the old state. That was the problem: magnificent rights that were never followed. From the first few meetings of the Constitutional Convention Grant attended as a delegate, the general consensus was that the new Constitution would tweak the old one to make sure it didn’t slowly get whittled away, but all the good stuff would remain in the new version.