Chapter 89
Coruscant, Corusca System
Corusca Sector
Where’s the Supreme Chancellor?
Senator Mon Mothma of Chandrila could only wonder as she took her place in the Grand Convocation Chamber. It was no ordinary session of the Galactic Senate. The occasion marked the end of Chancellor Palpatine’s third consecutive term in an office that only permits two. By the laws laid out in the Republic’s founding documents, his time in office should have ended four years ago; instead, the Emergency Powers Act, enacted by majority vote at the onset of the Separatist Crisis, had extended his authority indefinitely.
But as the stars now set on Serenno, more and more voices began to rise in the Senate: when exactly will this ‘emergency’ end?
The answer, of course, lay in the fine print of the very amendment that had given the Chancellor such sweeping control. The state of emergency could only be terminated by the Supreme Chancellor himself–a decree that would effectively strip him of the extraordinary powers he had amassed. Except, over the past four years, the Senate had passed four additional constitutional amendments, each granting him greater authority under the guise of wartime necessity, culminating in the ghastly overreaching Reflex Amendment passed at the peak of the Crisis in the Core, in which Separatist warfleets struck as far as Coruscant and the Agricultural Circuit.
At this point, politely asking him to surrender his emergency powers would no longer be feasible. They had wilfully fed fuel to the fire for four years with their own votes and proclamations; to expect the fire to extinguish itself now would to be a fool.
They would have to smother this hungering flame the same way they fuelled it; with their votes.
Mon Mothma drove her repulsorpod deeper into the Convocation Chamber, exercising every ounce of bodily control she had to prevent herself from cringing under the scrutinizing eyes of two-thousand senators, tens of thousands of representatives, and trillions of galactic citizens.