National split 'more like federalism,' 'doesn't mean a civil war,' says Marjorie Taylor Greene

After making headlines last week calling for a "national divorce" along political lines, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene clarified on Monday that what she had in mind was "more like federalism" than two separate nations.

"We need a national divorce," she wrote in a Tweet. "We need to separate by red states and blue states and shrink the federal government. Everyone I talk to says this. From the sick and disgusting woke culture issues shoved down our throats to the Democrat's [sic] traitorous America Last policies, we are done."

Legacy media outlets and Greene's online detractors seized upon Greene's remarks, likening her proposal to the secession movement that precipitated the Civil War. The Georgia Republican, however, has contended that she seeks not to partition the United States between Republican and Democratic bastions, but rather to decentralize the federal government and leave major issues to state legislatures.

"[O]ur founding fathers never envisioned this over bloated, overly powerful, invasive federal government that is really responsible for ruining our country," Greene said Monday on the "Just the News, No Noise" television show. She then listed numerous ongoing political issues over which the nation had become sharply divided, such as aiding Ukraine and balancing the budget.

"Americans on both sides of the aisle are sick and tired of all of it, and they're sick and tired of the federal government," she went on. "So, I simply propose that we need a national divorce where we can split into red states and blue states — and no, that doesn't mean a civil war, and that doesn't mean that you can't travel to different states, and there would still be trade and commerce and so forth."

"But it's simply a divide because we're really sick and tired of fighting with each other. And blue states, well, you know what, if you have transition schools to change children's gender, that would be horrific, but that would happen in blue states. If they want to have Antifa burning down cities and they want to abolish the police in blue states, have at it.

"But in red states, we would be protecting kids. We wouldn't have drag queens gyrating in front of elementary school students. We would be supporting our police, we would be getting crime out of the streets, and we would be protecting our borders." 

Greene's vision would be to curtail and focus the role of the federal government, limiting it to inherently national responsibilities such as security, while leaving nearly everything else to the states.

"The federal government would be reduced to a much smaller size, which means it wouldn't cost Americans so much money, and that would be a good thing for all of us," she said. "But it would have an important job to do, and that would be to support and defend our national security, defend our borders, maintain the strongest military in the world to protect all 50 states and, more importantly, get back to the role that our founding fathers saw for our federal government." 

In other words, Greene agreed, her idea of a national split "is more like federalism."

The conservative firebrand acknowledged the obstacle that political inertia posed to such an idea. Her national divorce would take "some bold actions in Washington that nobody in Washington wants to take, and that would be getting rid of our own power," she conceded.

"We would be cutting big bureaucracies and agencies department," she said, targeting the Departments of Education and Transportation at the top of her hit list.

"[I]f you look at the polling" on a national parting of the ways, "Americans support it, and they support it on both sides of the aisle," Greene claimed. "I'm just suddenly the only one that's willing to talk about it in Washington at this time."

Ben Whedon is an editor and reporter for Just the News. Follow him on Twitter.