Almost a month into the longest federal government shutdown in history, it’s time to ask why we in the Pacific Northwest don’t simply write off the swamp, take the Constitution and go our own way.

D.C. doesn’t function anymore – except for the wealthy and well-connected. Our federal income taxes support a Pentagon bureaucracy so bloated that the thing can’t even be audited. Elected officials in Congress – an institution with overall public approval ratings that perpetually hover in the high teens and low 20s – have been reduced to professional fundraisers fighting for pork projects in their home districts.

The time has come for us to start looking seriously at making Cascadia more than a crunchy granola pipe-dream of “Ecotopia,” and begin the hard work of engaging in the level of public engagement and discourse necessary to make it a working political solution. I say that if D.C. is – as it has clearly proven itself to be – fundamentally broken, then Cascadians should have the right to take the Constitution – the true soul of America – and go our own way. To find our own path forward in this mad and complex world.

America is such a diverse nation that I, as a Cascadian left-libertarian, have more in common with my conservative Christian neighbors than I do with progressives from New England like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. I have faith that we Cascadians can build a democratic nation that lives up to America’s true potential.

Andrew Tanner, Independence