Newly divorced Marjorie Taylor Greene urges divorce between red and blue states.

But divorce court wouldn't be as generous to red states as it probably was to Greene.

Ed. Note: The Resistant Grandmother (TRG) regrets writing still another column on Marjorie Taylor Greene, as I’ve been working on several non-Greene topics. But Greene’s call for a national divorce between red and blue states demands an answer, as it’s inspired a response not only from me, but from a wide range of others throughout the country.  Here’s my take on Greene’s latest affront to the country that pays her salary as the representative from Georgia’s District 14.

There’s an old political adage that urban politicians cannot mock or criticize rural areas, but rural politicians may disparage urban ones.  Another way of putting it is, it’s unfair to “punch down” but not unfair to “punch up.”

As noble as that idea may be, it also results in negative consequences for the cohesiveness of the country.  Rural lawmakers who already possess advantages due to red state gerrymandering and the Electoral College, routinely attack urbanized areas like New York, Chicago, and California cities San Francisco and Los Angeles as centers of “wokeness.” 

M.O. for bullies
These rural-based accusations lodged against an urban/suburban America now rank as the GOP’s favorite shiny object to distract voters from the party’s lack of a policy agenda, having few if any policies that anyone likes.

Whenever a national party spearheads an attack on women’s reproductive rights and calls for the dissolution of Medicare and Social Security, it’s got to have a “Hey, look over here!” trick up their sleeves.  Hence, the oft-repeated battle cry, “woke!”

The rural punch up to the urban U.S. took an especially ugly turn this week when Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) called for a “divorce” of red from blue states.  The reason? Greene said Conservatives were tired of being “bullied by the left.”

Typically, Greene refrained from talking specifics. Greene performs for the cameras, not researches or thinks.

Witness the Greene legislative scorecard and to-do list: zero legislation in two-plus years to address the real problems of her constituents (slowing economy, reduced access to health care, and growing opioid addiction) and at least 18 sponsored or co-sponsored bills on cultural issues-–expanding gun rights; reducing women’s reproductive freedoms; requiring schools to teach airbrushed versions of black history; placing restrictions on health officials for enforcing Covid vaccine requirements; and again calling for Congress to impeach Joe Biden.

Bottom line: all cultural BS, no real help for Georgia’s District 14, and winks and nods to the GOP’s scary and unstable base.

For starters, exactly how would a red/blue divorce work? Greene offers only nonsensical sound bites and platitudes, leaving the rest to our imaginations.  So…another firing on Fort Sumter?  Constitutional referendum?  A controlling formula using a balance of Democrats v. Republicans holding state and federal offices as determinative of the state’s “color”? 

Again, Greene doesn’t say, other than to create the broad outline of a federal American government that somehow encompasses her bifurcated vision, but one that would be greatly diminished in scope and influence.  My guess–no IRS, FBI, CDC, and Department of Education, based on previous Greene calls to defund these institutions. 

Asylum, meet inmates
Ridiculous on its face? Not worthy of all of the attention Greene’s remarks are getting?  In a saner world, yes. 

But now that Greene ranks as the second most influential member of Congress given House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s indebtedness to her for his job (“I could never leave this woman!”), anything Greene says cannot be dismissed as just more barking at the moon from an avowed Q’Anon follower who never held a full-time job before being elected to Congress in 2020.  

Greene typically raises money for the Republican Party from her attacks and outbursts.  And her ideas get play among the alt-right GOP base as the latest thing to latch onto in the way of agendas and future plans.  

Greene’s siren
So there’s always the chance that Greene’s call for a “divorce” among red and blue states will send a siren’s call to white nationalists who form much of the Republican Party’s base.  

Just as Trump’s “Come to the Capitol. It will be wild!” inspired thousands of armed insurrectionists to attempt a coup of the 2020 election certification process, Greene, who is popular with the same crowd, could be signaling a similar call to act.

“Let’s get our guns and make this happen” could be the natural extension of Greene’s “we need a divorce” comments. Given the events of the last six years and the threatening nature of Republican politics, who would not anticipate that a fevered mind could react in such a way?

Although Greene’s endgame-–“we would not need to argue with one another anymore”--sounds benevolent, like any idea, the devil’s in the details that Greene makes a habit of not thinking through.

The definition problem
First of all, who’s to say what’s a red state or a blue one?  Some choices are obvious, like Mississippi and West Virginia–states that voted for Trump both times in huge percentages and hardly ever vote for Democrats (except for W. Virginia Senator Joe Manchin) for state-wide or federal jobs. 

But what happens if a state like Michigan that has labored for 30+ years under an all Republican state government, suddenly flips to blue again, as it did in 2022 with Democrats taking over both houses in the State Legislature while retaining Democratic Governor, Gretchen Whitmer? Blue for its current political choices, or red for its 30-year history?  A civil war in the Wolverine State could flare up quickly over who’s to say what makes a state red or blue.

Voting trends versus history could also determine the red v. blue designation of Greene’s home state, Georgia. The Peach State has been trending blue in its election of federal and city officials and the city governments of its three largest cities–Atlanta, Columbus, and Savannah–which have all elected Democratic or progressive mayors and city councils. 

Odd (wo)man out?
Even Greene’s northwest part of the state has been described as being ripe for Democratic inroads, according to a Jan. 26 Washington Post article by Aaron Blake titled, “The big risk in legitimizing Marjorie Taylor Greene.” In it, Blake included a Georgia map with red and blue arrows showing areas trending to one party or another.  Greene’s district featured a blue arrow while others around it sported red.

Since Greene’s home state has been trending blue in its most populous areas, seems poised to turn blue in others, and has recently replaced its two Republican U.S. Senators with Democrats Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, there’s no guarantee Greene could hold on to her job in a red-now-tuned blue game of musical chairs. 

Homeland Insecurity
Logistics alone make the whole “divorce” idea so preposterous it’s amazing Greene floated it in the first place.  And all the more amazing coming from a member of Congress who serves on the Homeland Security Committee whose job is to protect America against attacks from within and without. 

Ironic, too, because Greene says things that in another time and place would have banned her from even serving in Congress, or at least, sitting on committees.  Two years ago in a bi-partisan vote in the previous Democratic-led 117th Congress, Greene was kicked off her assigned committees for “repeatedly (having) indicated support for executing Democratic leaders” including former president Barack Obama, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Senators and Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, and FBI agents (amp.cnn.com 04 02 2021).

But thanks to a narrow four-vote Republican majority in the new 118th Congress led by Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Greene now holds a seat on the powerful House Oversight Committee in addition to Homeland Security.  Oversight hearings have recently featured Greene attempting to grill Gene Dodaro, Comptroller of the Government Accountability Office (GAO), for what Greene believed was a federal grant of $5.1B to an elementary school in Illinois to develop a Critical Race Theory (CRT) curriculum. 

Greene: no facts, no problem
Greene embarrassingly and very publicly got her facts wrong, as was clarified by reporting, not Greene, after the hearing.  In reality, the federal government did provide Illinois $5.1B, not to benefit one elementary school but to help the state’s 850 K1-12 school districts with their post-pandemic openings. 

The federal grant was prohibited from determining any curriculum, leaving that to local officials. Instead, the money was allocated for construction, improvements to make schools healthier, special ed services, summer schools, and tutoring. How Greene believed the $5.1B was targeted for one elementary school is anyone’s guess.

In yet another, subsequent Oversight Committee hearing, Greene made still more headlines by yelling at former Twitter executives for in 2022 “unfairly” closing down her Twitter account. They did because Greene falsely claimed Covid vaccines were responsible for people dying, thus discouraging people from taking advantage of a potentially life-saving health measure.  But Greene never acknowledged how her actions could have harmed others, as her red-faced rant throughout the hearings continued to dwell on Twitter’s perceived unfairness to her.

So Greene’s difficulty at keeping facts straight or even having some in the first place is all of a piece with her failure to think through the economic consequences of her red and blue state divorce idea.   

“Irretrievably broken”
You’d think the economics of divorce would not escape Greene, coming off her own recent split from husband Perry.  Greene’s now former husband filed for divorce against Greene, stating his marriage was “irretrievably broken,” triggering his need to call it quits.

As with the dissolution of any marriage, property settlements are based on the length of the union, individual contributions to the marriage, and spousal ability to pay.  We can only assume MTG came out well, as the family construction business Perry has been running and continues to run has grown into a multi-million dollar enterprise during their 27-year marriage.  

Greene might have claimed she contributed to its success as she was listed as Chief Financial Officer (CFO) for five years…before being removed from the position shortly after the business was hit with local and county liens for unpaid taxes, according to an in-depth report on Greene by theAtlantic, “Why Is Marjorie Taylor Greene Like This?” Although listed as CFO on brochures and websites, Greene was rarely on the job, according not only to theAtlantic’s reporting, but also by an April 23, 2021 report in Georgia’s largest newspaper, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Businesswoman image key to Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rise“ (https://www.ajc.com/politics/national-politics/businesswoman-image-key-to-greenes-rise/5RX3LQEGUJFI5P6N6EQWZCA5T4/).

But while Greene may have come through her divorce in good economic shape, the same could not be expected of red states in a divorce from their blue state partners, based on data Greene either hasn’t bothered to research (my guess), or simply ignores.

Red states, meet “the cleaners”
According to information provided by the Rockefeller Institute on Government, the MIT Elections Lab, and the Brookings Institution, as presented recently on MSNBC by economist and former U.S. Treasury official Steve Ratner, red states would suffer much more than blue states under the red vs. blue state reconfiguration scheme.

That’s because blue states are far wealthier than red. Yet red states receive more in federal funds per capita than blue states who contribute more, but receive back less in federal largesse largely because they’re supporting their red counterparts.

Specifically, Southern red states in general but Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia in particular receive up to $2.90 on any one dollar they pay in federal taxes. In contrast, the wealthier blue states receive back an average of only 85 cents for every dollar paid in, their money going to red states to pay for road construction, Medicaid, federal installations, and other outlays that essentially prop these states up.

Perhaps the most dramatic example of blue state wealth and economic power vs. red may be seen by looking at the American counties that voted for Joe Biden in 2020 as compared to those that voted for incumbent President Donald Trump.

According to Ratner’s same Rockefeller Institute/MIT/Brookings Institution reports, 71 percent of America’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) flows from those counties that voted in 2020 for Biden. Only 29 percent of GDP comes from red counties that voted for Trump.

More pluses for blue states
In addition to being better off financially, blue states would also likely be safer with a red-blue separation. Red states with lax to non-existent gun laws and more gun-toting white nationalists than blue states produce most of the growing number of mass serial killers, according to a May 10, 2022 report on wttw/chicago/PBS. 

Assuming Marjorie Taylor Greene’s as yet undeveloped separation idea was more of a play for the cameras than a serious policy goal, it’s still beneficial to know that blue states would see big advantages–economically, politically, and culturally–not drawbacks, if Greene’s idea were ever to see the light of day. 

The freedom to outlaw weapons used in mass shootings; protect women’s reproductive freedoms; burnish their excellent K-12 and higher education institutions while red states ban books and clamp down on educational freedoms; and policy-based, not culture-driven, legislation that helps raise the economic tide for blue state residents make a strong case that Greene’s divorce idea would in some ways be a boon for blue states, but a bad deal
for red.

Lamenting the demise of a different Republican Party
Yet, despite such benefits, there’s been no call from blue states to enter into such a plan. 

Maybe that’s because the last time red and blue states repeated their vows to retain their sacred union occurred at Appomattox when the South surrendered to the North in 1865 following their failed, costly, and deadly war
of secession. 

But the 2023 Republican Party differs greatly from its mid 19th century ancestor.  After the Civil War and for a time beyond, Republicans represented equality for all Americans, and freedom. Now, Democrats more clearly protect those values. With MTG as its de facto spokesperson, today’s Republican Party no longer walks in the shadow of Abraham Lincoln. Instead it dwells within the confused mind and dangerous words of Marjorie Taylor Greene who calls upon the South, again, to secede.  And fail.

—trg

Correction: In citing the federal government grant to Illinois for post-covid opening expenses, the first mention of the amount in the 27th paragraph was correctly stated at $5.1 billion. The second mention of the amount in the 28th paragraph incorrectly left out the period between 5 and 1 and listed the amount as $51 billion. The error has been corrected, and The Resistaant Gradmother regrets the error.