Marjorie Taylor Green is a U.S. Representative from Georgia. To say she has the social skills of a horseshoe crab is a slur on the 445 million year history of horseshoe crabs.
Green is the most recent in a long line of politicians who think there is no rule they can’t bend, no social contract they can’t break, no line they can’t cross to stay in the public eye.
Mags is not the first. Just the latest.
As proof that if you go far enough toward the edges in politics you meet your most hated opponents coming the other way, remember “The Squad” led by NY Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
Flamed. Out.
Going farther back, Newt Gingrich, a back-bencher from the Atlanta suburbs and his mighty band called the “Conservative Opportunity Society” so irritated Speaker Tip O’Neill that O’Neill changed the rules about how House-controlled TV cameras covered after-session speeches called Special Orders.
Gingrich climbed up the ladder he had designed and built to become Speaker himself, before the GOP Conference turned on him following the 1998 mid-terms.
The Republicans in the House are so riven that a thug like Matt Gaetz of Florida can hold the current Speaker’s feet, attached to the body of California’s Kevin McCarthy, to the fire anytime he feels like it.
But the current firebrand – or firefly – is Margorie Taylor Green who has call for Red States – those who vote for Donald Trump – to secede from the Union leaving the Blue States behind.
According to the Washington Post:
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.”
Snappy title notwithstanding, it led to the Civil War when 10 other states joined South Carolina to form the Confederate States of America which were never recognized as a sovereign country.
It was an early example of another ill-fated withdrawal: Brexit.
Speaking of the Brits, they have taken a dim view of secession from the Commonwealth going all the way back to the American Revolution.
In 1869, according to Wikipedia, the U.S. Supreme Court in Texas v. White held that
The Constitution did not permit states to unilaterally secede from the United States, and that the ordinances of secession, and all the acts of the legislatures within seceding states intended to give effect to such ordinances, were “absolutely null.”
Texas v. White was actually about the ability of Texas to recover the funds from bonds sold by the Texas legislature after they approved secession from the Union.
In spite of the current SCOTUS’ redefinition of “settled law,” it would make overturning Roe look like dismissing a parking ticket compared to granting states the right to secede.
Short of actual secession, Maggie Green has come up with another theory: From Salon.com:
“She suggested that Democrats who move to Republican-controlled states should be banned from voting in elections for up to five years.”
This, via a radio host, to “stop liberals from trying to invade our states or our counties.”
The very Constitution that Greene, et al. cheerfully ignore, gives states broad power to regulate voting rights. Some states allow felons who have successfully completed their terms, to have their voting rights restored.
Some states allow legal non-citizens to vote in state and local (but not federal) elections on the grounds that they pay taxes and live in their communities and should have a say in how those communities are run.
If someone moved from a Blue state to a Red state because they wanted to live in the perpetual political Eden of a retirement community in Florida, would they have to swear to support Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis to avoid disenfranchisement for five years?
Would their children be trained to listen for buzz words like “Medicare” and “Social Security” and “Labor Unions” and report their parents to their teachers at school?
Don’t laugh. We’re not that far away.
Marjorie Taylor Green, like her predecessors, will sooner or later burn up upon re-entry.
How many scars she and her ilk will leave on our body politic is the question.
See you next week.
