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Tag: secession
An Oregon case, People Not Politicians v. Secretary of State Clarno, was decided last week in favor of People Not Politicians, a group that has struggled obtaining signatures to qualify Initiative Petition 57 (IP 57) for the November 2020 ballot — while observing the governor’s stay-at-home orders.
It is hard to collect petition signatures under social distancing.
So the court is forcing the Secretary of State to give the group some leeway in advancing their redistricting measure.
This is good news for another citizen activist group, Move Oregon’s Border. Chief Petitioner Mike McCarter wants to place initiatives on county ballots in eastern, southern, and southwestern Oregon. His idea is to split off from Willamette Valley politics altogether, leaving wokester Portland — of the comedy Portlandia and antifa riots fame — in the distance.
But he does not want to form a new state. The secession is mere prelude to accession . . . to Idaho!
It has been a long time since the United States has fissioned a state, West Virginia during the Civil War being the most recent — Maine and Kentucky before that.
Great idea? Well, this goes far beyond these two western states. California is ripe for break-up, for by such a political reformation the ratio of citizens to representatives could be increased in favor of citizens.
The idea of calling the proposed new, larger State of Idaho “Greater Idaho” seems a bit much. Surely “Idaho” would do.
But the idea is politically more possible because it wouldn’t change the partisan complexion of the United States Senate, thus avoiding riling up one of the two major parties.
Other fissions, and fusions, would be much harder. Too bad. People should be able to insist on better representation. Democratically.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Yesterday, the chief sponsor of a Washington State legislative bill withdrew it. He said it was “a joke.” His co-sponsor wasn’t laughing, however . . . even proclaimed an intent to introduce the bill again next year.
The legislation’s purpose? Split the state into two.
The eastern, drier half of the State is much less populated, and the wet, western half gets its way almost all the time. The bill’s sponsor mentioned his intent: to call attention to the persistent lack of effective representation.
It was not a funny* joke. What he meant, surely, was “a stunt.”
This is just one of many ongoing secessionist movements in the United States. Most represent the eternal struggle between more self-reliant, community-centered and less statist country folk and the more atomized, fearful statists of the cities. But also present is the problem of representation. There is not enough of it. Many people do not have a voice. Hence the desire for exit.
“Voice” vs. “exit” are two crucial aspects of constitutional politics, particularly relating to different kinds of “freedom.”
Many states could use splitting, California, especially.
But exit is not the only option. Representation itself could increase in sheer numbers; California, anyway, has (astoundingly!) too few politicians, er, representatives . . . per residents.
Another key constitutional change would be to set the bar higher to passing new legislation, especially regarding adding tax burdens.
But not for the people. We are best represented by our own votes, which means initiative and referendum rights extended to all states. Citizens of Washington State (still intact) lack the ability to change their constitution by initiative — an important process for future state shape shifts.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Originally, the new state’s name was to be Liberty, much better than the states of Tyranny, Servitude and Denial. Now I read that the proposed name is Lincoln, awkwardly tied to our union’s most determined anti-secessionist. That is a bit funny.
When last we touched upon the strangely over-the-top Californian reaction to the Trump presidency, the secession movement, I took the occasion to bring up the rather less radical separatists in the north. “Already 21 of the 23 northernmost counties,” I wrote, “have made declarations to form the State of Jefferson.”
But now there is a new wrinkle.
“Former UKip leader Nigel Farage and Leave backer Arron Banks recently helped raise $1 million for Calexit, which would split California into eastern and western regions,” we learn from the Daily Mail and the World Tribune. Banks, citing the high disapproval ratings Californians give their government, said that “he and Farage wanted to show people in California ‘how to light a fire and win’ the Calexit referendum.”
Their proposal is distinct from complete secession. It would amount to a California split, with the west coast (Los Angeles and north to the border) splitting off from the rest of the state. This would form an East California and a West California.
Politically, this might appease the conservatives and moderates who live in more rural east and Southern California, especially since they are coming to increasingly despise Left Coast “liberals” (read: progressives). Whom they not implausibly blame for ruining the state.
But it leaves some Jefferson secessionists stuck with those “liberals.” This, if an oversight, is a big one. Would this not doom the scheme?
While the failed initiative effort of 2014 to split the state into six separate states was far too complicated to wrap one’s head around, the new Calexit effort seems too . . . simple.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Californians account for more than one of every ten Americans.
For now.
Three years ago, an initiative sought to split the mega-state up. Had that measure succeeded, the U.S. Congress would have decided whether to permit the Golden State to become six separate states — with ten more U.S. Senators.
Now, a group called “Yes California” is petitioning for a 2018 ballot measure on leaving these United States altogether: Secession. “California could do more good as an independent country than it is able to do as just a U.S. state,” says its website.
Supporters argued in a recent Washington Post feature that California “subsidizes other states at a loss.” Indeed, it’s one of 14 states that get less money back from the federal government than paid in taxes.
And there’s Trump. Opposition to the president is palpable. California provided Hillary Clinton with a 4.3 million popular vote margin over Republican Donald Trump, 1.5 million more than her national margin.
“It’s understandable why the election of an evil white supremacist swindler as president,” wrote Zócalo Public Square’s Joe Mathews in the Fresno Bee, “has given the idea of California independence such currency.” Nonetheless, he opposes #CalExit as divisive and “not very Californian.”
Nationally, for partisan reasons, Republicans may cheer it, while Democrats shudder.
Me? I’m for self-determination.
But, remember: Northern Californians have been agitating to secede from the state since 1941. Those desires are picking up steam — especially with trepidation over whether the Oroville dam will hold. Folks feel unrepresented in the state capitol.*
And they are. Already 21 of the 23 northernmost counties have made declarations to form the State of Jefferson.
Let Californians decide . . . county by county.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Note that Trump won by a landslide in the counties that would comprise Jefferson, our would-be 51st state.
As America stands upon a precipice of insolvency, as southern European nations undergo the spasms of sovereign debt catastrophe, as many of our citizens call the Chinese devaluations of their money “currency wars,” obsessing about political symbolism seems . . . a tad . . . trivial.
First it was the Confederate Flag. Now it’s Jefferson Davis.
He’s dead. And as a result of his 126 years in the “post-living” state, he quite literally doesn’t matter for the future of the United States.
And yet the Confederacy’s president (1861-1865) is in the news again. As Charles Paul Freund relates at Reason, the dead rebel prez has been having a figurative “bad summer.” How? The University of Texas has decided to move his statue into a museum, away from public eyes; some Georgians want to obliterate the Stone Mountain tableau that features Davis along with Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee; there’s talk of renaming Virginia’s “Jefferson Davis Highway”; etc.
Davis died unrepentant, refusing to ask Congress for a pardon for his part in the Confederacy after the secessions of 1860 and ’61. And yet he was pardoned in 1978, posthumously, by the Democratic Congress and President Jimmy Carter, who yammered on in a Fordian “long national nightmare is over” fashion, saying the pardon would, at long last, “clear away the guilts and enmities and recriminations of the past.”
I’m not convinced it did a thing.
And about the current proposals? I don’t think any highway should be named after any politician. Of the other ideas, I don’t really care. Much.
Nevertheless, fights over political symbols have long been important. Why? My guess: to deflect our attention — away from the future, and to the past.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
