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No, not from her husband. That’s already in the works, as Perry Greene, husband of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, filed for divorce in September, 2022. Instead, Greene wants the United States to divorce along political lines.
Tweeting on Presidents Day — of all days — MTG posted this:
We need a national divorce. We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat’s traitorous America Last policies, we are done.
I don’t know who this “everyone I talk to” is, but as a Republican active in my state’s politics, I know no one who wants this. Moreover, many in conservative media have expressed alarm at her comments.
National Review editor Rich Lowry tweeted:
Great idea. So who gets control of the 1.3 million-strong U.S. military and the stockpile of 3,800 nuclear warheads?
While Utah’s Republican governor Spencer Cox called her idea “evil:”
This rhetoric is destructive and wrong and—honestly—evil. We don’t need a divorce, we need marriage counseling.
And we need elected leaders that don’t profit by tearing us apart. We can disagree without hate.
Healthy conflict was critical to our nation’s founding and survival.
MTG fired back by calling Cox a “RINO,” (because of course) and added “People agree with me and not the RINO governor of Utah.” Again — what people?
Conservative commenter who goes by the handle “AG Hamilton” tweeted:
If you don't like our system of government, feel free to move. If you don't like policy outcomes, work to change them. But members of Congress swear an oath to the Constitution and have no business publicly calling for the dissolution of the Union that Constitution governs. https://t.co/FILHn3IlL3
— AG (@AGHamilton29) February 20, 2023
He’s right. She swore an oath to the Constitution. And while I’m no fan of former Rep. Liz Cheney, I have to agree with her:
You swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Secession is unconstitutional. No member of Congress should advocate secession, Marjorie.
Marjorie Taylor Greene walked into a hornets’ nest with that idea. But then again — being outrageous has been her modus operandi ever since she arrived in Washington, DC.
Maybe she didn’t expect the pushback she would get from proposing a national divorce. So on Tuesday morning, Marjorie Taylor Greene doubled down on her proposal in a thread. She started with this:
Why the left and right should consider a national divorce, not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union. Definition of irreconcilable differences: inability to agree on most things or on important things. Tragically, I think we, the left and right, have reached irreconcilable differences. I’ll speak for the right and say, we are absolutely disgusted and fed up with the left cramming and forcing their ways on us and our children with no respect for our religion/faith, traditional values, and economic & government policy beliefs.
I won’t go on with the rest of the dreams she has for a national divorce; you can read them here. But she ended her thread with this diatribe. It makes you long for the days of the 140-character tweet limits.
Imagine if America decided to just go ahead and have a national divorce. Hollywood elites and celebrities and all the brainwashed leftists women who watch the nasty women on the View, men who identify as women, and Democrat voters who suffer from the lifelong debilitating disease Trump Derangement Syndrome they caught from CNN wouldn’t have to see much less tolerate deplorables anymore. They could live in their safe space blue states, own nothing, let their government decide and control everything, and most importantly protect their fragile minds from being shocked and insulted by those of us on the right who believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then Americans could choose which way, left or right, provides them with the best quality of life, and we don’t have to argue with one another anymore. I am starting to feel like it’s the right thing to do for everyone.
This isn’t a serious proposal. It’s red meat Marjorie Taylor Greene is throwing to the fringe right. This is half-baked nonsense from a woman who is supposed to be a serious member of Congress.
Greene has been mulling over a national divorce for some time now. In fact, she floated such an idea in October, 2021, when she tweeted out a poll about dividing the country to her Twitter followers. The results yielded about 48% wanting the nation to stay together, 43% wanting a split, and 9% undecided.
Remember, too, that this is hardly a scientific poll, and the respondents were most likely MTG aficionados anyway.
Two months later, Marjorie Taylor Greene floated the issue again, comparing it to her own marriage:
You know what is necessary about threatening a divorce? It’s a wake up call to the one offending the other that they’ve had enough. And if the other party cares at all, they look at what they are doing wrong and care to fix it …
Divorces happen in court or perhaps for a country can happen in Congress. I’ve been married 26 years, clearly I’m not in favor of divorce.
That didn’t age well.
But she’s not the only one who fancies the country tearing itself asunder. In fact, there’s a particularly unhinged Twitter user on the far left who not only wants a divorce, but wants to financially starve conservative states.
I’m speaking of the ever-wacky Keith Olbermann, of course.
"We are OWNED by guns. Only one thing will change that.
"We must have Economic Civil War. Blue States must financially starve the Red States, the Gun Lobby, the GOP, the Death Lobby, and the crooked judiciary into submission.
"NOW."
WEDNESDAY COUNTDOWN: https://t.co/OY1H1fwYj8 pic.twitter.com/fZLYlfKNbZ
— Keith Olbermann (@KeithOlbermann) February 15, 2023
Twitter wag Iowahawk noticed that both the far-right MTG and far-left Olbermann want the same thing:
Keith Olbermann: we need a national divorce
Marjorie Taylor Green: no, we need a national divorce
<eyes meet>
<commence rutting like pigs>
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) February 20, 2023
Well, they’re both single now, so …
Does Marjorie Taylor Greene want to win voters in the center? Does she want to reach those who can be persuaded to see conservatism as the best path forward? Or does she just want to “own the libs?”
Yes, I know Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow Squad gals are also unserious bomb-throwers. But they have the media on their side, which conservatives will never, ever have. So Republicans have to fight smart, something that Marjorie Taylor Greene knows nothing about.
With allies like MTG (and others), conservatives don’t need enemies.
Featured image: Gage Skidmore/flickr/cropped/CC BY-SA 2.0.
I can agree that a “national divorce” is not a good idea.
BUT… Show me the clause in the Constitution that says “No State may leave this association once entered into.”
DOES. NOT. EXIST.
I used to think like you. Government-run schools do an awful job of teaching us about the Constitution, and I went to one.
The Constitution is a charter that gives the Federal Government specific powers and only those powers. Just to make certain everyone understands that the Bill of Rights contains the 10th Amendment. So, read the 10th Amendment and think about it. The Constitution doesn’t provide a process for allowing states to leave the Union, but the Constitution does require the Federal Government to do the following: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government, and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened) against domestic Violence. (Article IV, Section 4).
Abraham Lincoln did not have a choice, not if he wanted to keep his oath of office. Lincoln’s oath required him to oppose succession. Peacefully and legally dividing the country would require a constitutional amendment, and the South was not willing to fight for one. Instead, when the leaders of the Democratic Party failed to impose slavery upon the rest the country, those leaders tried to destroy what they could not control.
Cameron says: The main argument I can see is this: The federal government is failing to live up to their responsibilities. If they continue down that path, what choice is left?
Sigh… This tired argument again. Tell me, did ANY single seceding State switch to a non-republican form of government? No. They still had an elected legislative body, an elected executive, a separate judicial system, operating under the aegis of their respective State Constitutions.
That is, they did until Union soldiers (among which were many of my ancestors and relatives – none fought in gray, several died in blue) invaded them, defeated them, and imposed martial law.
The Civil War was fought to impose the will of the majority – which was to abolish the IMMORAL (not UNCONSTITUTIONAL) practice of slavery – upon the minority.
So, WHO violated the guarantee of a republican form of government to the citizens of some States?
I did not make any tired, old, argument. I squarely addressed your argument and shot it down.
Your argument is “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”
The correct judgement that the Civil War was a “Just War” (from the political viewpoint of the Union, and of developing morality) is NOT bolstered by a specious ex-post-facto reading of the Tenth Amendment. A reading that was NOT used by the Lincoln Administration. Lincoln was quite correct – “a house divided cannot stand” – allowing any State to secede would have led to the dissolution of the United States. (An East/West division would have been the inevitable result within twenty years at the most – followed by even more fracturing. Assuming no foreign powers took advantage of it, of course.)
Stephen C says: Shake the place up. That’s what I say.
Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene is a loose cannon. She is constantly giving Liberal Democrats an excuse to point to Republicans and call us extremists. The proper response is to point to the Democratic Party and observe that MTG’s response may be inappropriate, but she is nonetheless responding to the far more dangerous and extreme radicalism of the Democratic Party.
The vast majority of Republicans understand that even if we somehow manage to split the country into two or more nations, we will eventually find ourselves at war. That is one reason the founders insisted upon unifying the thirteen colonies into one nation. We must have a central government to resolve our conflicts. Unfortunately, Democrats are using the central government to create conflicts. Democrats are using the central government to transform our nation into an atheistic Socialist state whose leaders would have no respect whatsoever for our Constitution.
Instead of worrying about a few hotheads, we need to take the battle to Liberal Democrats. We need to discuss and debate the consequences of allowing these people to remain in power. We need to convince the American people to vote Democrats out of office, not MTG.
Hate_me says: I’m not opposed to secession. Is there a better outcome to such a divided nation? The status quo suggests a shift toward totalitarianism.
If this leads to war… well, there are worse hills worth dying on. Of course, I’d rather right the ship that is this great American experiment, but the opposition seems to reject the entire premise.
The federalism-confederalism debate has been ongoing since the Continental Congress. The Civil War did nothing to settle it.
Some argue that secession is unconstitutional – but it’s not mentioned at all in the Preamble, Article I (section 10 comes close, but would be void if the state is no longer a willing member of the union), Article II (the President’s oath is to preserve the Constitution – note the capitalization, not to preserve the membership or else it would be just as much violation to add states, expressly allowed under Article IV, as to subtract them – of the United States), Article III (secession from is definitively different from levying war against), Articles IV-VII (VII specifically notes that ratification of the Constitution only applies to those states ratifying it… this implies, should such a state lose faith in the Constitution’s protections, that they can remove that ratification via republican process – joining was solely the decision of that state, no other state had a say and no other state should have a say in any decision to secede), or the first nine amendments and, thus, the decision to belong to or step away from “these united States” is the purview of those states or individuals, not of any other states or of the federal government.
Bucky says: Wait until California, Washington and Oregon come out in favor of secceeding from the union and see what these people have to say.
Taylor says: MTG is a Putin loving whacko!
Kevin says: A “divorce” implies irreconcilable differences, the relationship is too far gone and too damaged to repair. If that were the case over the past 200+ years given all the angst, strife, struggles we have gone through, instead of the “United” States of America we would be the “Divided” States of America today. We’ve had massive strife and struggles throughout our history … I doubt that MTG reads or understands anything about the history of the United States of America. We will get past this current division and will embark on a new conflict … we’re just working through who gets to pick the next conflict.
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