Basically, we get all the New Yorker-reading lefties, and Texas can have all the crazies — millenarians with basement stockpiles of semiautomatics, true believers who blockade abortion clinics, paranoiacs who think The Gays are coming to get them, and anyone who believes that evolution is "just a theory."
straw man much?

I wonder how sneering, pseudointellectual fucktards like the author of this op-ed feel about being lumped together?
oh, wait...
Basically, we get all the New Yorker-reading lefties
I've got a better idea. why don't we hand over most of new england to canada (where it belongs) and parts of california to mexico (you wouldn't even notice a difference) and let the populations vote with their feet?