It's Happening: Multiple Counties "Secede," Declare "New California" as Ind. State
California secession movements are right up there with new Jimmy Hoffa burial place claims: That’s great, but I’ve heard it all before, and please call me when there’s some actual evidence something’s going to happen this time.
So, when yet another secession proposal from the capital of high taxes, high homelessness, high residents and low hope of any prosperous future flashed across the news wire, you can probably imagine that I wasn’t exactly telling the folks in the newsroom to hold the presses.
However, for once, the denizens of the Golden State might have come across a decent idea involving secession — and it could create a 51st state that Republicans can actually approve of.
According to the San Diego Union-Tribune, a movement called New California seeks to become the 51st state by divorcing the majority of the state’s territory from the liberal coastal counties that dominate the state’s political landscape.
“New California is a new state in development by egregiously aggrieved Californians exercising our Constitutional right to form a new state separate from the tyranny and lawlessness of the state of California,” the group says on its Facebook page.
Those representing counties in the New California movement declared their secession from the state at large on Jan. 15, although that’s probably not going to impress too many people in the Sacramento statehouse.
The group’s website notes that “(a)t the New California State County Representative meeting held in Marysville, CA, Riverside and Sacramento counties were certified by the representatives to join the ever increasing number of counties wanting to join the movement to create the 51st state in the Union.”
According to The Daily Caller, 21 of the 58 counties of California have offered support, even though the matter is doomed to fail in the state legislature because of Democrat infestation.
This is the map of the proposed New California in blue, with Old California (or California Classic, should they wish to emulate Coca-Cola’s marketing department) in yellow:
The group says that “years of over taxation, regulation, and mono party politics” have left the state “ungovernable.”
“The nature of the state becoming ungovernable has caused a decline in essential basic services such as education, law enforcement, fire protection, transportation, housing, health care, taxation, voter rights, banking, state pension systems, prisons, state parks, water resource management, home ownership, infrastructure and many more,” New California’s executive summary says.
California’s political status has been much in the news since President Donald Trump’s election; many liberals have proposed seceding from the union to form their own country, while conservatives who feel marginalized in the Golden State have re-entrenched themselves behind the idea of the state of Jefferson, a long-proposed 51st state incorporating conservative parts of two liberal states, California and Oregon.
Unfortunately, while one has sympathy for anyone somehow stuck in a state whose prospects for economic health and growth in the 21st century are right up there with those of Mama Cass running this year’s Los Angeles Marathon and winning, the Constitution is pretty plain about cleaving extant states into two new entities.
“New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress,” Article IV of the Constitution reads.
In other words, they have to get both Congress and California as a whole to sign off on this. And while the GOP-led Congress might be more than happy to let the über-liberal coastal areas and Silicon Valley go their own way, the coastal swath of the state probably isn’t going to be so keen on letting the rest of the state loose as it’s is about to undergo a serious debt crisis.
However, we can’t help but give our tacit support to the people of the New California project, quixotic though their attempt may be. After all, it can’t be anywhere near as bad as the Old California — or California Classic, if they go with that.
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