Marjorie Taylor Greene backs away from “national divorce” call: Last week, the controversial Georgia Congresswoman called for red and blue states to split up, leading to bipartisan condemnation. Now, with a Fox News appearance, she’s starting to back down.
Marjorie Taylor Greene: Did She Change Her Mind or Was She Misunderstood?
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is known for making outrageous statements and not backing down from them.
That seemed to be the case with her call last month for a “national divorce.”
“We need a national divorce,” Greene had said in a tweet on February 20.
“We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this.”
For at least a couple of years, Greene talked about wanting to bar people from blue states from moving to red states, or from not voting.
She reiterated that this week, stating that conservative states should take that step.
“If Democrat voters choose to flee these blue states where they cannot tolerate the living conditions, they don’t want their children taught these horrible things, and they really change their mind on the types of policies that they support, well once they move to a red state, guess what, maybe you don’t get to vote for five years,” Greene said on Charlie Kirk’s show this week.
It’s not clear if it would work the other way, with people moving from red states to blue ones, or if it would apply, say, to Republicans moving from New York to Florida.
Similarly, Greene was light on examples of how the “national divorce” idea would work, especially since the Supreme Court has ruled that states cannot secede from the union.
Several people also noted that because Greene’s home state of Georgia went for President Biden in 2020, Georgia would be part of the blue faction in any post-divorce scenario.
Later on, on Twitter, she backed down a bit, declaring that she envisions “not a civil war but a legal agreement to separate our ideological and political disagreements by states while maintaining our legal union.”
Clean Up on Aisle MTG?
Greene tried cleaning up her words on a Fox News appearance earlier this week, on Sean Hannity’s show.
After first talking about the recent incident in which she said she and her staff were accosted in a restaurant, Hannity asked her what she meant by the “national divorce” statement.
“Everyone else just talked about me and assumed what I was saying and accused me of trying to start a civil war, accusing me of secession and all kinds of things,” Greene said in the Hannity interview, as noted by the Washington Post.
“What I’m talking about is reducing the size of our federal government and giving more power and control to our states to be the identity that they want to be, whether it’s blue or red.”
Appearing with Hannity, Greene made it more about conservative people in red states wanting to get away from liberal culture, including “the woke ideology being shoved down our throat.”
And despite years of right-wing mockery of “safe spaces,” Greene told Hannity that “we want our own safe space and we deserve it.”
Hannity steered her towards a more traditional conservative viewpoint, of “reducing the size and power of the federal government, giving more power to the states.”
As noted by the Washington Post, Greene spent her first year in Congress yelling into a void, as a member of the minority party who was barred from serving on committees.
But now, Greene is part of the Republican majority in the House, allied with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and once again serving on committees.
In one of them, earlier this week, Greene questioned a witness before the Homeland Security Committee whose two sons died of fentanyl overdoses.
She had blamed the deaths on President Biden’s border policies, even though both young men died in 2020 when Donald Trump was president.
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Expertise and Experience: Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
