5) Voter Registration is Good for You.
Congress had passed it. Naturally, Congress expected someone else—in this case, as it happened, the Department of International Affairs—to figure out some way of actually doing it. Looking at the three newly appointed commissioners, Ed Piazza grinned. "See if you can instill a proper appreciation of motherhood and apple pie in them, while you're at it. And good luck. I'm going to be busy with other projects for the next few months, so talk to Arnold Bellamy if you run into any problems. This is his baby, now."
Bellamy frowned. He always found the bureaucratic acronym N.U.S. rather unfortunate, since the German word Nuss meant "nut" and could be easily extrapolated to "nuts." Knowing how humans react to any opportunity to put down the enemy, he could see a "laugh at the interlopers" campaign coming. "They're all nuts."
The Special Commission, for all practical purposes, could be interpreted to mean the Grantville Commission to Force the Franconians to Accept the N.U.S.' Laws Establishing Freedom of Religion. It was one of those things Mike Stearns thought needed Ed's personal attention quite a bit more than the upcoming Rudolstadt Colloquy, if only because the administration already established by the N.U.S. probably wouldn't appreciate being gifted with a special commission. Its very existence at least implied that they wouldn't be doing their jobs right. Or that something, somehow, was lacking.
"I wish you were going to handle this, not Arnold Bellamy. It's not that he's hard to work with. He's just . . ."
". . . reserved," Ed said. "Reserved and still not entirely comfortable working with you."
"Stiff," Mike said. "Rigor mortis and all that."
"It won't get better unless you work with him. Arnold is perfectly competent. He had a different teaching style than I did, sure, but the students never really griped about it." Ed thought a minute, "It's likely, of course, that not even his wife ever calls him by a pet name. But this is no longer a few thousand people with an administration run by an Emergency Committee that you by and large picked because you knew them and—mostly at least, with a few exceptions like Quentin Underwood—liked them. It's a country of nearly a million people. With an administrative staff comprised mainly of down-timers whom you have never met and may never meet face-to-face. Whom you probably will never meet face-to-face. The commissioners report to Arnold; Arnold reports to you, at least for as long as I'm otherwise occupied. Welcome to the bureaucracy, Mr. President."
Arnold Bellamy, looking at the congressional resolution, cleared his throat and commented, "`Civil?' Congress does understand that these were ecclesiastical principalities, don't they? That the rulers of the three biggest ones were two Catholic bishops and a Catholic abbot? That the best one can say about the distinction between `civil' administrations and `ecclesiastical' administration over there is that it's pretty vague?"
"Well," Mike Stearns answered, "the down-timer delegates do, at least. On the other hand . . ."
"I know. The Congress has a couple of Catholics among the down-timers. And for Grantville's senator we have Becky, who's Jewish. And if Wilhelm of Hesse-Kassel ever showed up to take his seat in the House of Lords, otherwise known as the Senate, we would have a Calvinist. He, however, is chasing around northern Germany in command of an army unit. For all the rest, we've got Lutherans in the N.U.S. Congress. For the simple reason that Lutherans are what we landed in the middle of—the state church of almost every place that's joined the N.U.S. confederation: Badenburg, Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, Sommersburg, Sondershausen, Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Altenburg, Saxe-Coburg, Saxe-Eisenach, Saxe-Everyplace Else, you name it. Except for the transients, the refugees who've come in from outside because of the war, they've all been Lutheran for a century, give or take a couple of decades here and there."
Mike Stearns sighed. "You know perfectly well what they thought they were voting for. They thought, no matter that it's officially titled a Commission for the Establishment of Religious Freedom, that it's really a Commission to Make Catholic Franconia Safe for Lutherans."
"So does Gustavus Adolphus, for that matter, according to the letter he sent down. Our captain-general thinks that it's a grand idea. So does his chancellor, Oxenstierna."
"What other frame of reference do they have?" Mike was directing the question more to the air than to Bellamy, but Arnold answered.
"At least, since they think they know what we're doing, Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg has loaned us this Meyfarth guy to help. He wrote the original set of German words to that awful tune that won the N.U.S. national anthem contest. And we're going to need all the help we can get. Trust me on that. Here's a summary of the reports I wrote last fall when I went down to scope out the situation."