Yeah, but how long do you think that will last when they insist that “our rules should apply to everyone”?
I’m not convinced a divorce wouldn’t be followed by an invasion.
^ exactly
They don’t want peace and they don’t want to be left alone: they want a fight.
How’s this whole national divorce thing going to work when red states and blue states don’t have contiguous borders? Are we really going to cross an international border five or six times to get from Virginia to Nevada?
I wonder who exactly gave her this dumb idea.
That only sounds silly because you’ve never had to do it before. It wasn’t so long ago that this was the norm in Europe, after all.
Not every border would have formal checkpoints, though, probably just the ones that really piss people off.
But yeah, it likely won’t be two big, weird countries of Blutopia and Redistan. A few states might band together on a regional basis, but most of the big ones would probably just end up as de facto new countries.
And this probably wouldn’t happen over night. There’d be a process, in which the Federal government is weakened in favor of the individual states, until the states are really running just about everything anyways.
A Constitutional Convention could re-write the Constitution to enable this. Call it “Super Federalism”. The vast majority of State powers are explicitly vested in the individual States, and the Federal government is curtailed in power to dealing with only a few key things, like National Defense. Sure, some people will say that’s going to lead to unfair situations, but by this point, those people will be an ignored minority.
The country won’t break up. People will bicker and squabble and disagree as they’ve done for almost 250 years, and it’ll keep going as imperfectly as ever.
…A “National Defense” that, in practice, would be no match for foreign aggressors.
You’re certainly describing Xi Jinping’s fondest dream. Pushing the idea that ‘Americans might just as well support breaking up the USA into sovereign states–it would be totally cool!’ will be occupying the flying fingers of many a foreign-intelligence and foreign-military cyber operative in coming months.
Look on the bright side - the world-wide economic collapse the breaking up of the US would cause would likely impoverish China (and Russia) so much that they couldn’t afford to invade the US.
Canada might poach a few states, though.
Oh, Wyoming, please! Something about that state.
And Florida. We would like Florida too, please.
Need to figure this out a little bit more.
I live in Washington State. It’s practically Canada already. If it gets annexed I’d be okay with that.
Didn’t we already do a government something like that, from 1781 to 1789?
Yes, a confederacy. Multiple allied sovereign states not beholden to a central federal authority because each one is its own federal authority.
It didn’t work. You really do need that central government.
“Flying fingers”. Is that an "It Conquered the World"reference?
Yes, especially for ‘national defense’ considerations. And for international trade. Seriously, 50 entities trying to make trade deals are weaker than one giant entity trying to make trade deals by a factor in the millions.
People seriously trying to sell this idea have to hope that their audiences are IQ-challenged, because otherwise it’s going to be uphill all the way.
Not to mention inter-state trade disputes! One of the major factors in the failure of the Confederacy was that the individual states were getting into ever-increasing inter-state tariff wars.
That was exactly why the new Constitution explicitly included the Commerce Clause, stating that Congress alone could regulate interstate commerce, and why the courts, up to and including the Supreme Court, have taken that clause so seriously to this very day.
Greene’s personal Twitter account has been permanently banned after repeated violations of Twitter’s covid-19 misinformation policy. Greene, of course, decries being censored.
Further discussion in the SRIOTD thread starting here, et seq.:
Absolutely, and due to its non-partisan, non-ideological nature, this should be the first thing brought up when anyone tries to sell the “why not break up the USA into separate sovereign states?” idea.
Ah, so she wants the government to take control of the private company that is Twitter, and force them to print her manifesto. Sure, Marxist Comrade Greene