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Marjorie Taylor Greene again argues 'red states' should separate themselves from federal government [1]

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Date: 2023-02-21  

Are we seriously doing this? [Checks with editors...] Okay, apparently, we are. Let's take a good, hard, long look at what Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and her allied Republicans want America to become, if they could remake the country in their own image. Greene isn't leaving much to the imagination; she knows what she wants, and according to her, "everyone I talk to" wants it, too.

x 🧵Thread:



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… https://t.co/6hko0vnHbd — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

It is given of conservatism that "the left" is forever "forcing their ways" on conservatives and that conservatives never ever "force their ways" on anyone else because conservatives just don't, that's why. And, if you ignore now-prolific bans on what books libraries are allowed to stock, restrictions on what religion you are allowed to publicly follow, an insistence on murdering children for the sake of a gun fetish the rest of the nation does not share, laws forbidding entertainment the right doesn't like, restrictions on what science can be taught to children, and what portions of history can be taught to children, and what medical procedures grown adults should be barred from obtaining, and a firm belief that corporatism requires government to step out of the way when it comes to deciding which patriotic communities to douse in carcinogenic toxins, well, then conservatives still would not have a valid point, and the argument would continue to be both insincere and demonstrably stupid.

Already, then, we're off to the races. The premise is set; America now suffers from "irreconcilable differences" because "the left" just won't shut up about things that piss "the right" off, and the only way to make them shut up is to break off the conservative states so that those states can implement The Left Must Shut Up laws, and you think I'm kidding, but I'm not. You might think that Marjorie Taylor Greene, having thought about these things for a long time and having spent enough staff time on this no-I-didn't-mean-secession thread to put all sorts of words in all sorts of places, would have a deeper point to make—you might think that, if you had never once in your life heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene. Lower your expectations.

No, lower than that. Keep going.

x Reducing the federal government would be easy because states would completely control things like education, trade and commerce, and communications to a much larger degree and the federal government to a much smaller degree. — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

And already we've hit the first curb. Tough break for us, but we should have seen it coming.

A "national divorce" might indeed shrink the size of the federal government, but it would do not a damn thing for our debt or our spending problems. This is the logic of a child. "Reducing the federal government would be easy" if each state "completely" controlled "education, trade and commerce, and communications," but it would require, of necessity, at least 51 different departments doing each of those damn things.

Are we presuming that each state will have its own departments controlling trade and commerce, with state customs inspectors rather than federal ones? Are we assuming the Federal Communications Commission will be disbanded, and that each individual state will set its own communications standards, split, and auction off its own airwaves? That phones in one state may simply not work in another, depending on whether each pair of states cooperates with all the others?

Creating 51 versions of every major federal agency, none of them required to abide by rules set by any other, will create less government how, then?

There's only one obvious answer; the assumption is that none of the things the federal workers are doing will need to be done. No safety standards are needed, no customs officials, no border security officers, no communications laws, and certainly no education standards. Government will shrink because all of it will simply ... go away.

x Red state schools would bring back prayer in school and require every student to stand for the national anthem and pledge of allegiance while blue states would likely eliminate the anthem and pledge all together and replace them with anthems and pledges to identity ideologies… https://t.co/z6rzwh3fQM — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

Departments, gone! Problems, solved!

We do not have to take these arguments seriously, of course. We can say, quite reasonably: This sounds like Marjorie Taylor Greene is on cocaine. These ideas are both conspiratorial in theory and ridiculous in practice; to say other Americans have "no respect" for them should be considered, by those other Americans, a badge of honor. If Greene can envision a future in which children are stood up by force to pledge themselves to "the Trans flag," we are hardly being more rude if we observe, respectfully, that Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be on a lot of cocaine. An enormous amount, even.

No, that is still understating it. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene appears to be, respectfully, the Cocaine Bear of politics.

"Perhaps some blue states" would have "government funded Antifa communists training schools," says Cocaine Bear. Yes, the punditry proclaims, smoking their pipes and nodding along. Make sure you portray Republican Cocaine Bear with respect in your columns, everyone; we can't have anyone suspecting that Cocaine Bear is not a serious contributor to the [Cocaine Bear bursts into the room, drags off Bret Stephens, Pamela Paul quietly stands up and claims Bret's chair] discourse.

x Red states would not have to abide by climate cult lies.



Red states would be completely free to build and use fossil fuel energy for their citizens.



Oil, natural gas, clean coal, and nuclear power would very likely be growing strong energy sources for red states.



Red states… https://t.co/zSVPljJuLn — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

At some point, Republican politicians are going to discover that a measurable chunk of every human population does not have a "biological identity" conforming neatly with Republican versions of what "gender" is. This has been known for, quite literally, thousands of years, and is only un-discovered when a particular version of homophobe emerges to declare that all of the nontypical cases do not exist, because shut up, that's why, and each and every time one of those dull-headed human beer koozies pops up to say so a new political Cocaine Bear quickly leaps to the scene to propose new laws declaring "shut up, that's why" to be the official position of the state.

It is akin to the old story of a legislature declaring pi to be exactly 3, because having it be something other than 3 was just too damn inconvenient. For political figures to sincerely not know that biology itself takes no interest in societal theories of gender ought to be deeply embarrassing—and especially so to the party of the supposed heartland, where every livestock rancher and poultry farmer could point them to a regular stream of counterexamples.

x Red states would throw out all Environmental Social Governance regulations and requirements on corporations and businesses.



Companies would no longer have to meet ESG scoring measures on anything from hiring to work culture to products.



In red states companies could hire based… https://t.co/rtnNGJ5suw — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

Got it, toxic train explosions for everybody. Pollution is patriotic, and cancer is freedom. Republicans are currently attempting the double-somersault of demanding President Joe Biden personally do something to save a deep-red town from the consequences of a train derailment and toxic chemical spill while simultaneously condemning anybody who suggests rules that would make such spills less likely to begin with, and that is ... normal. That's the perfectly normal Republican stance now. Cry about regulations, vow to cut regulations, cut the regulations, bleat in fake fury when a consequence ensues, tell the victims that the real problem is trans people or immigrants, cut the regulations again.

x Of course interstate trade, travel, and state relations would continue.



However in red states, they could have different rules about store product placement on national store’s shelves. In red states, I highly doubt Walmart could place sex toys next to children’s toothbrushes. — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

Would they, though? Would interstate trade, travel, and state relations continue?

We are already seeing proposals in multiple "red" states to restrict interstate travel if there is a possibility that someone might leave the state to terminate a pregnancy. Would Americans be able to leave red states of their free will, or enter them? Their belongings would have to be searched every time a state line was crossed, now that federal trade rules and enforcement have been scrubbed out. Will there be newly fattened state agencies to do that, or will red states encourage vigilante groups to take up the slack?

You cannot have vastly conflicting state laws about what Americans can do or say or own without each state setting up an apparatus to enforce those things. You cannot pass new state laws restricting who can leave the state and for what purposes unless there are agents with guns standing at the border to make sure. Are we at the small government part yet?

As one example: What happens to safety standards for cribs and car seats? Will there be 51 versions of those? Can they be transported across state borders? Who decides? Will a "red state" car even run on "blue state" gas, or will the formulations be too different?

x Law enforcement would likely look different in red and blue states.



Red states would likely have highly supported law enforcement officers and well funded agencies. Police officers would be well trained, paid, equipped, and seen as heroes once again, not portrayed as racists… https://t.co/3jNZ3d5STn — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

It's nonsensical. There are no actual proposals here, or even theories. It's just an opium den vision of a future that will never come to pass, a vision governed solely and completely by Republican spite and conspiracy.

Red states have high crime rates. Red states will have even higher crime rates when "law abiding gun owners" are encouraged to shoot others to defend their "property"—or would, if red states were not redefining crime to exclude property-related murder. Red states wouldn't have "highly supported law enforcement officers" because red states don't want to pay for those things, and currently rely on federal money for what they do have.

Where is the money for this shoot-em-up surveillance state coming from, in the conservative mind?

x 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… https://t.co/zKnpmC8fDk — Marjorie Taylor Greene 🇺🇸 (@mtgreenee) February 21, 2023

At this point, Greene is concocting a snuff film inside her own mind. There's no responding to it, really. She's giving a speech to an audience that isn't there, on a planet that doesn't exist, invoking themes and smells and colors not perceptible to mortal minds.

Although, yes, one imagines red states would crack down heavily on which Americans can vote, setting up any number of new hurdles; this has been one of the most dependable red state methods of discouraging "undesirable" voters since Emancipation. It's never not used, though it's not often paired with disinformation on the scale that Greene and her fellow Republicans attached to it when Donald J. Trump could not attract enough votes to win reelection.

It was thus that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene concluded her new mayonnaise opus, at least for the moment. Not that she is done with the theory, mind you. She's quite enchanted with it.

x Marjorie Taylor Greene: "If Democrat voters choose to flee these Blue states...Well, once they move to a Red state, guess what? Maybe you don't get to vote for five years" pic.twitter.com/AcAPwmYXcu — Jason Campbell (@JasonSCampbell) February 21, 2023

You will note, dear reader, that while this now-influential coup supporter, seditionist, and House Republican has many theories on what the United States would look like after red and blue states were allowed to go their own separate ways, all of them rely on the presumption that red states would no longer have to follow the Constitution. There would be no First Amendment. No protections for non-dominant religions. No federal protections for interstate travel or trade.

Greene and her ilk cannot imagine what blue states might look like, but she is very clear on what red states would do if freed from constitutional constraints.

There would be prayer in school. Not your prayer—Greene's prayer. And if your child doesn't like Marjorie's religion being "crammed" down their throat, then they can either shut up or put on a list.

There would be no nationwide educational standards, and red states would scrap "traditional" public schools in favor of "charter schools, homeschooling, technical training," and other institutions that would ban "confusing theories."

Red states would strip themselves of most environmental and safety regulations; if that becomes a problem to you, personally, then it sucks to be you.

At no point is there any explanation of how the red states, which traditionally have leeched off more prosperous blue states for a sizable chunk of their own government funding, would finance the duplication of federal departments. More conspicuous still is that Greene believes stripping the federal government of most of its functions would somehow "solve our debt and spending problems immediately."

Would all that debt simply go away, then? No, we can presume not; the federal government will still have to collect sufficient taxes to service that debt, even as it does nothing at all for red state residents. Will red-state Americans continue to fork over that money, or no? Even as they pay much higher state taxes to duplicate services that were once federal?

But the biggest flaw in all of Greene's logic, and the flaw that drops her no doubt fervently thunked-up theories down into the realm of Republican Cocaine Bear bellowing, is this one:

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene does not come from a "red" state.

Greene comes from a deep-red portion of Georgia, a state with two Democratic senators and one that voted for Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the last presidential election. For the moment, and perhaps only for the moment, Georgia is a blue state.

Or does Greene intend to argue otherwise? Are we doing this national secession plan according to which party holds the governor's seat, and not by presidential vote? Oh—or is it by legislative seats, and the party that wins the governorship is irrelevant?

There is the flaw in all of this: The entire notion of dividing by "red" and "blue" states is, ahem, deeply and irrevocably stupid. There are no fully "red" or "blue" states. There are no states that consist entirely of a one-party population. The "red states" of the American south would not be engaged in a century of Jim Crow-styled voter suppression if there were not votes that needed to be suppressed. Not even the supposedly far-left California has a uniformly Democratic population; there are portions that are just as resoundingly conservative as the hellholes—er, hard-right towns—elsewhere in the country.

What Marjorie Taylor Greene and in fact all far-right proponents of secession are arguing for is that states with Republican governments should be able to do away with the federal government and Constitution both—and that all Americans in those states who oppose that conservative rule be subjugated by force of law.

As for the conservatives in Democratic states, they can apparently equally pound sand. No guns for them. No shooting your neighbor because you thought they looked "Muslim." And you still have to pay your taxes, and the school libraries will still have books about penguins even if it makes you mad.

So what happens when a state flips from red to blue, or vice versa? Greene currently represents a deep-red streak of Georgia, and is very plainly arguing that her constituents be stripped of conservative rights and abide by Democratic rule—unless she believes that the state's vote for Biden doesn't matter and it's the Democrats who need to be subjugated, and golly gee, it's sure going to be difficult to pin down which of the two she means.

There are two ways the partial secession of "red" states could evolve, then. Either each state's entire government will have to be upended each time a state's legislature, governorship, congressional delegation or presidential electors flip from one party to another or, and this is more likely to be what Greene's opus is meant to imply, once the red and blue states are sorted out, on some particular future day, the government of each state will be presumed to be an autocracy from then on. The other party will simply be barred from electoral competition, because, after all, the "other party" is, according to Greene, so lawless and predatory that the United States of America had to be unmade rather than abide it.

Fifty states, all under one-party rule. There will either be mass evacuations of the losing partisans, in each and every state, or states will have to wall off their borders to prevent such devastating economic losses from occurring.

Do you see, now, why I have been referring to Marjorie's important and serious proposal as the bellowing of a political Cocaine Bear. Do you see, now, why none of this even rises to the level of "perhaps we should engage the sedition-backing conspiracy crank's argument as if it was made in earnest."

No. It was asinine—no, it was stupid—from the very first post, where she insisted that state-by-state duplication or nullification of federal powers would magically Solve Our Debt Problems Immediately. It was stupid from the moment she horked up the conservative hairball blaming "the left" for "forcing their ways on us" even as conservative governments at various levels and in various states ban books about penguins and famous baseball players alike, demand that specific prayers of specific religious sects be forced on children in their classrooms, and invent new programs by which conservative children can be segregated into conservative non-public schools rather than have to sit near a child from an unapproved family or lineage.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is the Cocaine Bear of Republican politics, but she is not alone. This is what Republicanism is now. Greene can fill an entire thread with insults and conspiracy theories and casual calls to end the civil rights of anyone she doesn't agree with, but it's nothing that isn't immediately decipherable to Tucker Carlson viewers or fellow House Republicans like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Paul Gosar, or House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

It's Cocaine Bears all the way down, and they're in charge of the House, the Supreme Court, and a good chunk of state and local government. Yikes.

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