It’s Not About A National Divorce…

May 11, 2023

As the debt ceiling debate takes center stage in Washington, DC, the subject of a “national divorce” is once again making its way back into public discourse. And the subject is fair-minded to consider for a few basic reasons. But the proponents of a national divorce are looking at it all wrong.

Earlier this year, US Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who many consider to be staunchly conservative, took to the microphones and declared that the Democrat-Republican polarization of our country was irreparable; that our Republic has become so dysfunctional that we need a national divorce.

According to the New York Post, Greene stated:

“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 [sic] traitorous America Last policies, we are done…People are absolutely fed up and disgusted with left-wing insanity and disastrous ‘America Last’ policies. National divorce is not a civil war, but Biden and the neocons are leading us into World War III while forcing corporate ESG and gender confusion on our kids. Enough!”

I can’t say that I disagree with the catalyst for Greene’s comments. And I certainly agree with her sentiments. But the idea that we need a national divorce; that we need to separate into a Blue America and a Red America? That idea completely misses the very concept of what the United States was created to be.

An Attempt At National Divorce Would Force A Hand

Any attempt at executing a national divorce would force the hands of the players, both those on the Left and the Right, as well as the federal government as a separate entity.

To execute a national divorce we would eventually have to arrive at two separate nations; a Red nation and a Blue nation. This end game, as much as Greene insists it would not result in a civil war, would necessarily demand it.

Any fracturing of the status quo would require secession by the individual states. But which faction of states would secede, Red or Blue? Which group would be the one to disengage from the compact that created the United States of America: the US Constitution?

Further, what purpose would it serve to become a faction within a federal machine? To achieve that end would be to facilitate an easier path to political retaliation targeting the whole of the group of opposition to those who are elected to power.

Additionally, once that color choice was made, how could the federal government not follow in the footsteps of President Abraham Lincoln in doing everything in its power to maintain the Union, if for no other reason but the control of taxation; the revenue pipeline to the spendthrift federal government?

No, a national divorce; the factionalization of states, is precisely what we do not need.

In The Beginning (No, Not That Beginning)…

From the very start, the Founders and Framers knew that there would always be intellectual, cultural, and political divides in our newly formed Republic. They recognized that the concerns and interests of those who lived in more densely populated areas would differ – greatly – from those who lived in more sparsely populated areas.

That truth is left untarnished today. No greater intellectual or cultural divide exists in our Republic than between the urban areas and the rural areas. Each has its priorities and concerns even as each serves a vital purpose to the well-being of our country.

But that necessary balance for a healthy nation – intellectually, culturally, and politically – is grotesquely askew today.

George Washington warned in his Farwell Address that we, as a people, had to be diligent about maintaining oversight over what he called “factions” if we were to protect our country from the political parties:

“Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party, generally. This spirit, unfortunately, is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind. It exists under different shapes in all governments, more or less stifled, controlled, or repressed; but in those of the popular form, it is seen in its greatest rankness and is truly their worst enemy.
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty…”

Simply stated, we have not maintained even a semblance of oversight to protect our country from the political parties. In fact, we have ceded that oversight entirely to the political parties (who have hijacked government on the federal level) and have done so to the point where “the chiefs of both prevailing factions” are moving to eliminate the only protection the Framers gave the nation to protect the necessary balance between the urban and rural areas: the Electoral College.

So, Greene is correct in one basic point. We do need to do something to return to the balance necessary to maintain a healthy Republic, one in which one faction (think spouse for this metaphor) isn’t abusing the other into submission.

To be sure, elites and activists – on both sides of the ideological and political aisles – have willingly (and some would same purposely, myself included) entered our nation into an abusive relationship. The one-sided discourse emanating from both sides and at an increasing volume is akin to a bad marriage where neither spouse is listening – or cares to listen – to the other.

Emmett Lathrop Brown, PhD: Our Republic’s Counselor

Again, our Framers and Founders foresaw this malady. It was the entire basis for the Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates and precisely why they crafted the US Constitution the way they did; as “interactive spackle” to functionally fill in the cracks between the states.

The intentions for a federal government were made clear in our Constitution’s Preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America…”

Couple this with the several major – major – limitations to federal authority outlined in the Bill of Rights: and especially in the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, which read, respectively:

“The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.”

And,

“The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

These reserved rights to the states; these freedoms left to the states – at the time 13 separate states with 13 separate constitutions – allowed them to each have their own unique societal, intellectual, and political environments while keeping the government most intrusive on people’s lives closer to the electorate.

In today’s language that would read that Red states and Blue states would burden themselves with their own policies – and the costs of implementing those policies – without federal interference and without requiring other states to pay for the offending state’s largess, even as the full complement of the states banded together to fund a federal government to execute their very restrained original purview established by the US Constitution and limited by the Bill of Rights.

In The End…

No, we don’t need a national divorce. We need a return to the original form of government as bequeathed to us by our Framers and Founders. We need a return to a federal government that is restrained and where the state governments, individually, hold the most authority over their people.

So, again, Greene is correct in that we do need to aggressively restrain the out-of-control and overreaching federal government, but that doesn’t metastasize as a national divorce. Instead, the solution presents as a return; to each state clawing back its authority from the federal government so that people can live in places that are welcoming to their preferred cultures and ideologies, and the level of governmental interference in their lives they are willing to tolerate.

It does not require civil war to achieve this goal; this return to political and cultural homeostasis. It requires governors and state legislatures with the intestinal fortitude to do two things:

Pass state legislation that achieves two goals: a) forbids the direct remittance of federal tax dollars from a citizen to the federal government and indemnifies that action, b) codifying into law the channeling of federal tax payments – both personal and corporate – through the state capitols for remittance in bulk.
Invoke nullification on every federal measure and mandate – past and present – that oversteps the original purview of the federal government as mandated by an originalist interpretation of the US Constitution and Bill of Rights;

Regarding the first point. This move allows the states (the citizens of the states in their capacity as US citizens) to provide resources to fund the constitutionally sanctioned costs of running the federal government. This also prevents the spendthrifts of the federally elected class from redistributing a state’s wealth to subsidize the failed policies of other states or wasting taxpayer dollars on ipso facto gifts to globalist entities and international bribery.

Re-empowering the states to their originally intended levels while terminating the federal government’s gluttonous overreach isn’t a radical idea. It’s an originalist idea. It is employing the mindset that created our nation; a mindset that established a free people, not a people laboring under the false pretense that they are free even as they exist under the thumb of an elitist totalitarian oligarchy.

No national divorce, but it is time for the people to rekindle their love relationship with the original idea of what our nation was at its creation. What it is today isn’t even a shadow of what the Framers left to us.

Governors, state legislators, the ball is in your court.