A post I didn't want to have to write

"National divorce" [shakes head]

One of the cool things about what I do now is that I don’t have to write about any one thing. There’s no assignment editor pinging me every morning asking if I have thoughts on this story or that story. I can pick my spots.

Which is why I had been refusing to write about Marjorie Taylor Greene and her ridiculous proposal of a “national divorce” in which red states and blue states separated — forming their own versions of America.

And, even when MTG unleashed a Twitter thread about how the divorce would actually play out — you can read all of that here — I resisted writing about it.

Why? Because it’s an utterly unserious proposal — which is obvious if you spend 2 minutes (or less) thinking about it.

Like:

• How would we handle national defense?

• How would the national debt — and the federal government’s borrowing system — work?

• How would we even define a red state or a blue state? Solely by performance in a presidential election? And even if we did that, what if the state flipped from red to blue or vice versa in a subsequent election?

• How would people travel between red states and blue states? Would there need to be an immigration system?

The un-seriousness of the proposal is evident. And that lack of seriousness was laid bare by Greene herself when she was asked about how she would handle people in blue states moving to red states.

“Well, once they move to a red state, guess what? Maybe you don’t get to vote for five years,” she said. “You can live there, you can work there, but you don’t get to bring your values that you basically created in the blue states you came from by voting for Democrat leaders and Democrat policies.”

Yes, right. The solutions for the problems in our democracy can definitely be found in suspending the rights of citizens to vote because they don’t see eye to eye with you on issues. Perfect.