Friday, December 31, 2021

What Happens When a Member of Congress Threatens Treason?

Rep. Majorie Taylor Greene has been threatening a "national divorce" between red and blue states over "irreconcilable differences."

Her threat turned into a Twitter trend on Wednesday when she took the whole idea a step further.

Basically what she's saying is that, under a national divorce scenario, red states could decide that anyone who moved there from a blue state would be barred from voting during a "cooling off period."

I have one question for Rep. Greene: Would your home state of Georgia be one of those red states? In the 2020 election, 49.47% of Georgians voted for Joe Biden, 51% chose Raphael Warnock, and 49% voted for a Democrat in congressional races. 

I realize that Greene isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I don't think she's thought this one through. She could very well find herself living in "blue America" if her national divorce scenario actually came to pass.

On a more serious note, what we have is a member of Congress threatening secession, which is treason. House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has stayed silent as members of his caucus posted videos of killing their political opponents or called them terrorists. But even more damning is the fact that, at this point, he hasn't said a word about one of them threatening treason. That is how far down the rabbit hole the GOP has gone.

What the rest of us are left to contemplate is whether Greene represents the fringe right or the Republican base. Sen. Chris Murphy - who has never been known to be alarmist - weighed in on that question.

In addressing the same question, the always level-headed Steve Benen wrote that "the line between the GOP mainstream and the GOP fringe has grown awfully blurry." When a member of Congress threatens treason and the leadership of her party stays silent, that might be the most optimistic take on where things stand.

2 comments:

  1. If they secede, they can say goodbye to their military bases, Medicare, Social Security, all the many grants the red states get (most red states get more money than they pay in to the federal government - takers), etc.

    Of course they don't think about that because they are so used to the largess of the blue states that help to keep them afloat.

    Greene and the rest of the sedition squad must be prosecuted. If Garland is not working on taking them down he needs to be replaced, since the sitting GOP Congresspersons won't vote to expel their fellow members.

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  2. A state-level map might, if read sideways and with a long list of assumptions, imply the possibility of a "national divorce". A county-level map instantly shows that it is utterly infeasible.

    The problem is that the rural mindset, which intrinsically emerges from low population density, and the urban mindset, which intrinsically emerges from high population density, are completely irreconcilable. They agree on nothing, at a civilizational level. Accordingly they cannot be governed as equals under a common institutional or Constitutional framework. One must be explicitly and totally subordinated to the other. The Founders knew this; their crime was to covertly subordinate urban to rural, while pretending to straddle, as if straddling could ever be a good idea.

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