Contemplating a national divorce

This week, I stumbled upon a recording of a radio interview with Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has been advocating for what she calls a “National Divorce.” By that, Greene suggests that portions of our country should undergo a secession of sorts, cutting ties to our mega-powerful national government and forming a coalition similar to the European Union or perhaps even our former government under the Articles of Confederation. It’s not an idea that is taken seriously by serious people, but it has caught the attention of a growing number of activists on the extreme right.

If you aren’t familiar with Greene, she is a far-right Republican of the MAGA-Tea Party tradition and one of the last hold-outs insisting that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. She has been the gift who keeps giving for left-leaning comics and is a considerable source of heartburn for the more traditional elements of the Republican party.

Ms. Taylor-Greene’s proposal is nothing new. It has been mentioned before on both the right and the left, particularly as the divide grows between liberals and conservatives. During the early days of the Trump administration, a few of my Democrat friends in Lincoln suggested the same, but that rhetoric wasn’t driven by ideology so much as anti-Trump emotions. The use of the word “divorce” suggests that Greene’s effort is emotional as well.

One of the reasons that Ms. Greene’s “divorce” won’t happen is geography. Looking at states alone, the predominantly Democrat states occupy both coastlines, while the red states lie in between. The conservative states might emerge as a single, contiguous body, but the more left-leaning states would have considerable distances between them.

If we look within the states, our divorce scenario becomes even less likely. Within every red state, such as ours, at least one major city leans left. Where would a divided U.S. leave them?

A slightly more realistic scenario would be a constitutional convention, often called a “Convention of States.” It too is championed by unserious people, but it at least has constitutional validity. Article five of our constitution stipulates that Congress “on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states, shall call a convention for proposing amendments.”

That’s our process for remedy, should we find a flaw in the Constitution. Notice that it falls upon state legislatures to call for the convention, and they would need to do so by a hefty two-thirds of the states. Given our current election map, that’s a high bar to reach. Once the convention is formed, any amendments proposed would have to be ratified by an even higher margin, three-quarters of the states. Those provisions return power to the states as our founders had envisioned, and as Martha Stewart would say, “that’s a good thing.”

While it’s nice to know that our Constitution provides for revision (without a judicial sledgehammer) I can’t help but shudder when I imagine what a convention of states would look like. All of the fringe special interests, on both left and right would be out in full force and all contentious topics (guns, abortion, climate) would be on the table. In short, it would be a televised circus. The most likely outcome would be a stain on our international reputation.

I continue to believe that the founders put a remarkable government structure in place. It was designed from the bottom up as a conduit for the “Liberty” that we often see on coinage, but infrequently stop to consider. Having said as much, no one is perfect–not even our founders. They left just enough loopholes, like the general welfare clause, to skip past the tenth amendment and allow the federal government to grow much larger than any of the founders had intended. Consequently, our federal government has become the new King George, and without attention, our next reference point could be the fall of Rome.

My sense is that there is a bit of entropy built into any democratic structure. As a people, we want to take care of our ill and elderly. We want to educate our children. We want to create opportunities in areas that are struggling. It’s all well intended, but it only adds to the size and cost of government. Very few programs ever sunset. Elected officials, by their very nature, love to give handouts, but they don’t dare take anything away. We all know this, right?

As I watch our national debt soar (about 129% of GDP at last count) and the dominance of the U.S. dollar fade, I realize we don’t need a national divorce or a convention of states so much as fiscal restraint. I have heard about balanced budget amendments for as long as I have followed politics, and as wonderful as those may sound, quite a few serious people don't think a rigid, balanced budget requirement would be a good idea either. The ability to run deficits has acted as a line of credit to smooth out our economic bumps and when needed, to wage war. Both of those have been increasing in frequency and I’m not seeing efforts to pay the resulting debt down.

What should we do? A pay-as-you-go policy might be good to stop the hemorrhaging, but secession or a constitutional convention won’t hold the answers. Political fads rise and fall like tides, and that’s all Ms. Greene’s proposal will ever be. We can only hope that a wiser congress can one day restore strength to our dollar and return government to something that the founders might recognize.