That wasn’t the end of it, however. Harry Reid and the Democrats were still busting my nuts by delaying confirmation hearings on any number of appointed officials. Most of the governmental agencies that regulate the financial markets all had bosses that needed to be confirmed by the Senate. This included the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Office of Thrift Supervision, and so forth. Some of the seats had been empty for a year or more. I had a list of two dozen names ready to go.
I made a preemptive move. After it became obvious that the Congress that would return was the same as the one we had, I called a meeting at the White House of the leaders of the Senate, and of the Finance and Banking Committees, both Republican and Democratic. The Dems wanted to bust my nuts and the Republicans wanted more influence than the Dems would give them, and nobody wanted to piss off the financial firms who flooded their campaign coffers with cash. Nobody actually wanted to fill these positions; they really wanted them to go away so that we could have unfettered and unregulated capitalism, which is what the financial firms dreamed about.
Screw that idea! I laid out the game rules to the Senate leaders. Here is my list of candidates. There are just as many Democrats as Republicans listed, which in many cases was required by law. They have extensive experience and have been properly vetted, and most of these names are well known to you already. Pick two, any two, you don’t like, and I’ll withdraw them. Otherwise, I expected confirmation hearings to begin before the end of the session, and I expected them to be approved. If you didn’t like that, I would wait until after the Senate reconvened in January, and during the first available recess would name them all as recess appointments.
There was a lot of squawking at this! How dare I usurp the power and privilege of the United States Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body! My God, I was a dictator in the mold of Stalin and Hitler! I let them rant, and then stood up and smiled. “You heard me. Pick two. I don’t care if you flip coins. The rest get approved by the end of the year, and I don’t care if you have to run the confirmation hearings by candlelight in the wee dawn hours! Frank will stay here to let me know your plans. Otherwise, watch me on television in January. I’ve done it before and, by God, I’ll do it again!” I left the room.
Secretly I had given Frank the authority to raise the limit from two candidates to three, but that still left almost two dozen appointees. He came back to my office two hours later grumbling and exhausted, but the Senate had caved in. At that moment I was a hell of a lot more popular with the American public than Congress was. Frank let the three candidates know they weren’t going to be confirmed.
Lame duck, my ass!
One major legislative push I had planned was more infrastructure investment. I didn’t expect this to be a problem, though. In 2002 I had rammed through several major spending bills on infrastructure as part of my first year in office. I had wrapped them in the mantle of GWB’s martyrdom as cynically as possible, and they all passed. A number of them, however, were five year bills, so 2007 was when we had to let them die or renew them. I wasn’t just going to renew them, I was going to expand them, and just like in 2002, they were going to get a prominent mention in the next State of the Union Address. I expected more of a fight, simply because George was now cold and forgotten, President for only eight months, and I couldn’t wave that flag anymore. I simply told Matt and Marc to start typing and figure out a different approach.
By the end of 2006, Charlie had managed to hold onto his national title as an MX Motocross Champion. The MX class was the larger bikes, 450 cc or so, larger than the other categories, which was good, since Charlie was a big guy. He wasn’t so much tall as he was broad, with shoulders that would fill a doorway and muscles on top of his muscles. If the motorcycle broke down, he could probably pick it up and run it around the track.
The season ended in mid-September, just a few weeks after I was shot, and Charlie had only missed one race that season. Now he was in the off-season period, but that didn’t mean he was out of work. Now that he was a big time pro, his ‘team’ had changed. Bucky, his original ‘Crew Chief’, was now acting as his business manager, but otherwise was spending his time becoming the heir apparent at Tusk Cycle. Sister Molly, his ‘Assistant Crew Chief’ was in her final year at College Park, finishing her Masters, and looking for a job somewhere. Charlie himself was busy with a new endeavor — acting!
One thing Marilyn and I had done over the years was produce good looking children. In my first life, Maggie had been a knockout, and Parker had been quite handsome, and only Alison had issues, related to the Williams Syndrome she suffered from. Now, in this life, Charlie was quite good looking, and Holly and Molly were simply stunning. They might all have been nitwits and knuckleheads, but that was probably a father’s reaction to their antics. In reality, by any quantifiable measure, they were all 9s and 10s.
Unsurprisingly, Charlie’s sponsors wanted more out of their marketing dollars than simply their names on some mud-encrusted bikes. As part of their contracts he was obligated to do a certain number of public appearances, do meet-and-greets before and after races, schmooze the locals who were brought in by the corporate types, and do some ads. Charlie had two major sponsors by now, with several smaller ones. The big one was Red Bull, and whenever there was a race, they would always have local distributors at a party with their stars, and Charlie would pose for photos for local ads and such. The Marines also used him like this, but often without his racing outfit, and instead dressed in camo and a t-shirt that showed his Semper Fi or globe-and-anchor tattoos. Tusk Cycle, a small sponsor these days, had him do meet-and-greets at their Honda store, and had posters of him at all their stores. Honda pushed that, also, since he rode a Honda when racing. (He rode a big Harley around otherwise.)
In any case, Charlie was a big and good looking young man with curly blond hair and a big mustache, and it wasn’t surprising that Red Bull began using him in television ads. At first, they began simply using race footage, with some shots of him drinking Red Bull before and after. Then they decided to take a chance, and actually have him say some words, which went surprisingly well. I wasn’t quite sure how happy this made me and his mother, since a typical commercial might show him drinking Red Bull, racing, drinking more while getting a trophy and hugging a blonde bike bunny, and then drinking more at a nightclub, with more blondes. Some of the scenes seemed a bit raunchy, but I guess they sold a lot of Red Bull. Charlie didn’t seem to mind hanging out with blonde models and starlets, that was for sure!
Charlie even began acting, as in the movies. He was cast in a thriller as himself, so that the hero could build some credibility to his character, a motorcycle racer. It was sort of like XXX with Vin Diesel, only lamer. He was only onscreen about 30 seconds, and had two lines, which he told his sisters ad nauseam. Regardless, Charlie got a week’s vacation in southern California out of it, and met another leggy blonde.
It was a relatively quiet time legislation wise. We had the usual budget and spending bills, but since we weren’t in a serious prolonged deficit situation, as long as I said no to any of the nuttiness, we would be okay.
One thing that I did push for was increased natural gas drilling in various shale formations around the country. The technology to actually do this relatively cheaply was now available, and oil and gas prices had been rising over the years to where it made economic sense. Since I had managed to avoid wars of conquest, which really pissed off the oil producing companies, and scared the pants off the speculators on my first go, prices were lower and more contained. Still they had been rising. More importantly, without Dick Cheney and George Bush kissing a lot of oil company ass, we had managed to avoid the so-called ‘Halliburton Rule’, which exempted drilling companies from some state and EPA regulations. With more regulators looking them over, the process seemed like it was being cleaner and more transparent. I knew that this could be a real gold mine. I pushed for some sensible regulation, though I made sure not to spout any “Drill, baby! Drill!” nonsense. Yes, Lee Raymond wanted me to allow all sorts of shenanigans for his help after Katrina, but I pushed back and reminded him of the introductions I had made in Kurdistan, and then asked if he wanted me to call Barzani and introduce him to some people I knew at Chevron and Conoco Phillips. He grumbled, but backed off a bit.