Adducci started to cuss a blue streak, which finally dwindled into, "Hell, it's like John and Bobby Kennedy, more than anything else, I guess. Brother act."
Mary Kat Riddle shook her head. "I wish Ms. Mailey was here. Or Mr. Piazza. But I'll do what I can to sort it out for you all." She pushed her hair behind her ears, a little nervously.
"Let's start at the beginning. William Wettin isn't 'running for prime minister.' That's not the way it works in a parliamentary system. Wettin's running for the lower house of the USE parliament from the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar—which is now actually one of the counties in the SoTF, just like we are."
She looked at Count Ludwig Guenther's wife Emelie, who was going to have a baby . . . just any minute now, it looked like. She was due this month. They'd gotten to be friends. "Or you are, in Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt."
"Okay."
"If the Crown Loyalists win a majority of the seats in the USE House of Commons in this election, they'll pick Wettin to be prime minister. Or, technically, send his name to the emperor, who will have to agree, pretty much, the way things are set up now. Gustav won't just be able to appoint someone, right out of the blue, the way he did with Mike last year. There's an actual system in place."
Count Ludwig Guenther nodded his approval.
Mary Kat looked back at Tony. "Let me back up a bit. Since Wettin is a commoner now, Duke Ernst is away working for Gustav, and Duke Bernhard is a loose cannon, Duke Albrecht has been representing Saxe-Weimar in the SoTF House of Lords."
Tony nodded. "Okay."
"The USE doesn't have a House of Lords, exactly, even though its parliament is designed on the British model. In the CPE, its upper house used to be called the Chamber of Princes. We carried over the title but added the provision that if the head of state or a province was an elected or appointed official, then that official represented the province in the Chamber of Princes." She smiled. "That's why our very own unassuming Ed Piazza will wind up being not just the SoTF president, but also the SoTF 'prince' in the Chamber of Princes."
"I don't like this mixing the executive and legislative branches together," Joe Stull muttered. "We learned about checks and balances in civics. There's supposed to be three branches of government and they're supposed to be separate."
"We all know, Joe," Tony said. "We've heard your opinion before. My wife says that Montesquieu would be proud of you."
"Who?"
Mary Kat looked at Count Ludwig Guenther, got a cue, and went on. "The reason Wettin's a commoner is that when they wrote the USE constitution, they put in a requirement that the prime minister had to be from the lower house—the House of Commons, not the Chamber of Princes. So he abdicated."
She sighed, pushing her hair back again.
Count Ludwig Guenther smiled. "Do you have a problem?"
"I honestly don't understand this one, myself. I mean, we'd already 'slid' Saxe-Weimar out from under him. He wasn't a ruling prince any more. Being a duke was just a kind of personal title—not political, any more. If they'd had the constitution written up then . . ." She frowned. "I hadn't thought of this before, but Mike was the president of the NUS then. He'd have been serving in the Chamber of Princes then, just like Ed is now."
"Yes." Count Ludwig Guenther rather enjoyed watching the young up-time lawyer think.
"But Gustavus Adolphus just sort of arbitrarily appointed Mike the prime minister of the new USE, before they got the new constitution written. Ed succeeded him as president. Oh. This is baaaaad! Once he was president, since they weren't able to have elections, then Ed appointed Mike to the House of Commons from one voting district in Thuringia, making him eligible to be prime minister under the new constitution. Sort of ex post facto."
She looked at the count again. "Believe me, for the USA in the twentieth century, and ever since the American constitution was adopted, ex post facto was forbidden. Bad stuff. No ex post facto laws. But what else could Ed have done?"
He nodded. "I am familiar with the platitude that hard cases make bad law."
"Okay. But things were really crazy those few weeks right after the Battle of Wismar, so they had to do something sort of . . . retroactive . . . to fix the situation. Also, because Mike and Wettin had made a sort of gentlemen's agreement, Ed appointed Wettin to the House of Commons from another voting district in Thuringia. And . . . stuff happened."
"Scads of bad stuff," Joe Stull muttered. "I know all about it. It was all over West Virginia, up-time, like slime. Horace Bolender and his cronies down-time, too. 'One hand washes the other.' "