Reportedly, the election of Trump has caused some Californians to talk about secession. Secession got a bad name when the slave states did it, but the concept appeals to me. In general, I wish secession were easier in this country. I would like to see little towns be able to secede from counties, or counties secede from states, or what have you.
However, I have a hard time figuring out the logistics of a California secession. Take Social Security (please). On secession day, I assume that Californians stop paying taxes to the Federal government. So, somebody somewhere has to pay taxes in order for a Californian to continue to receive Social Security benefits. (You do know, don’t you, that the government never “saved up” your taxes to pay for your Social Security?) Will California taxpayers pick up the tab? Or will elderly Californians be encouraged to emigrate back to the legacy U.S. in order to get their benefits? And if the latter happens, will the legacy U.S. agree to let them in and give them their benefits?
Somebody needs to work out a generic pre-nup agreement if we are going to sort out the logistics of a state getting a divorce.
I am in California but this is stupid talk. The joke going around is Trump build a Wall but with Arizona, Nevada and Oregon. It is like Brexit where there were no real plans for separation. California economy would really be hurt with Tech, Hollywood, agriculture and Ports/warehousing having less access to the US. For somebody who wants open borders and movement of people, it sure sounds you comfortable with Brexit and Trump Presidency.
So why did California go so Anti-Trump in 2016? Although not watched a lot Darrell Issa seat in North San Diego may still be lost with the late vote. Realize Darrell always won by ~30% since 2000.
1) Trump won with anti-immigrant hurting ‘real’ America. In California everybody knows an immigrant and most will know of an illegal immigrant. (I knew of live in care taker of my wife Great Aunt.) They are part of the California culture.
2) A lot of the California working class work at the ports and warehouses. Look of the employment totals in the Riverside & San Bernandino counties if you don’t believe me.
3) Tech and Hollywood love free trade!
Whites in California vote further right then whites in Vermont. And yet Vermont has no immigrants.
California votes D because its a one party Latino state. Romney would have won it if just whites and Trump would have been competitive.
We can run numerous ‘What If” scenernios but even without Latinos, California still goes Democrat with various Asian- (15%) and African-American minorities. (And at this point there probably more Asian immigrants than Latino ones.) And there has always a lot of Latino-Americans in our state. (Around 20% in the 1980s.) Most of the segregation history of California centered on ‘protecting’ the white neighborhoods from Latino communities. On top of that, California agriculture has depended upon migrant workers since World War 2 and although illegal/guest worker these workers add a lot to the California economy.
Remember in terms of localism, most residents are living multi-culturalism and my kids are growing in a minority heavy school. (It is to the point that as parents we talk less about racial issues than my parents did 1980s.)
For social security, there is a document “your payments while outside the United States”, which includes the case of people who earned credits but then emigrated and even became citizens of those other countries. The easy answer is that it could work according to the rules for that circumstance.
The irony is that it is virtue signaling, but they don’t really want to do anything about federalism and the 10th amendment.
They are belly-aching over image but don’t want to fix the reality. They don’t want to be mood-affiliated with red states, but can be counted on to not do anything constructive about it. And what about the whole “so goes California…” additional irony? We don’t export our neuroses to California and the other liberal enclaves or tell them how to think. They do it to us, and it still isn’t enough for them.
Just go to a coffee shop and feel superior with your closest friends for an hour. You’ll be okay.
A cautiously optimistic hope for a Trump presidency might be a return to a more balanced federalism.
Maybe this election is a wake up call that it’s going to be very difficult for different parts of the country to express their cultural mores at a national level without rubbing shoulders with others whose slice of life has an entirely different sociological context.
The states themselves look like they’re beginning to segregate more ideologically and many of them probably have the social trust necessary to implement desirable policies that could never pass at the federal level unless they were seriously deformed from their original intent.
I like the naive assumption that California itself would not break up after the secession bug got started. There are already movements to break the state up and the interior where all the water and power for the coast region comes from votes red. Plus, with the coastal oligarchs and environmental despots gone, the central valley would have lots of water for irrigation, while keeping their national market for their produce.
Not to mention, the military bases, national parks, and other federal areas that were duly transferred by the state legislature to the federal government and I doubt they have a secession contingency.
“the interior where all the water and power for the coast region comes from votes red.”
Much the same could be said for this nation as a whole nation: It is simply a fact that to just survive, the urbanites who live in the mega-cities on both coasts must have essential resources that are the produce of the hard-working “deplorables” who live and work in the interior “fly-over” territory who, for the most part, vote “red.” And, yes, there are “blue” counties in the interior. But check out the demographics of those exception counties and you will find for the most part they are “dependent” counties who are populated by urbanites or they may be counties where large state-supported mostly liberal arts colleges and universities have a politically dominant presence. (Large, dependent institutions.)
How about expulsion? Can we “kick them out?”
I’m serious. If a state can depart, why can’t other states kick one out?
I live in Texas. My observation on Texas secessionists is that they tend to be intensely patriotic as to both America and Texas.* So what they really want is to be able to kick ALL the other states out of America, so they can hang on to both.
* The thought is that, while they love America, federal intrusion is irreversible, so we have to just leave, despite the fact that we love being Americans.
Hey, why kick out another state? Why not “think eviction, not secession” when thinking about the increasingly anti-Constitutional, anti-American globalist dominated entity that is at the root of just about the problems with which all states are having to try to contend: The government of that strange little foreign country that’s called The District of Columbia.
Boy the left would really screw over their allies in the rest of the country if this were to come to pass. The percentage of House members in the Dem caucus that hail from CA is…20%! If they really went through with that–and I do think in the age of Revolt of the Public we may head down that path at some point in the future–they’d be doomed in the House for years to come.
That would put the House R/D ration from 231-194 to 217-155. How many more years would GOP hold House if suddenly 39 Dem and 14 GOP members in CA suddenly disappeared to form their own government?
As Andrew said, it’s all virtue signalling non-sense, but careful what you wish for my friends on the left.
I am not sure whether the proponents see the ironies here. The “state” of Jefferson already wants to secede from CA. Their “case” should be heard before CA’s. Also, one would suspect that a good deal of these proponents would have been strongly against a more pragmatic, indeed constitutional, middle ground — more federalism. I wonder if this is because they want a strong central government if and when it subscribes to Californian views AND compels dissenters into submission, including enforcing some form of sovereign death penalty for, well, secession.
The ironies abound. The pro-“Calexit” camp are also the same kinds of people who thought Brexit was a terrible idea and have always opposed Texas seceding from the Union (and also the same folk who thought the Confederate States were an unholy evil).
You don’t break up with *them*, they break up with *you*!
The left is quite fashionable in that way, unlike their boorish counterparts.
As a conservative resident of California, I would have to say that I find the prospect both appealing and terrifying. On the one hand, as a conservative I am a big fan of decentralization. Hopefully this election is a good catalyst to start getting liberals to make concessions with regards to state’s rights.
On the other hand, I would absolutely not stay here if California ever seceded. I simply wouldn’t feel secure in my rights (let alone my property). It would be unfortunate, because I’ve got so many connections here (family, friends, community). However, as others have pointed out, the political landscape in the rest of the US would be significantly different, and might therefore be more appealing.
“If California Wants a Divorce, We Need a Pre-Nup”
Let’s see, California joined the union in 1850. So we probably won’t find the original pre-nup on a flash drive… 😉
There would be so many complications that secession seems unlikely in the foreseeable future. For example, the bigger issue than Social Security is the entire national debt. If states were allowed to secede without paying their “fair share” of the national debt, the states that remained would be left with a higher and higher per-capita burden, and lower and lower ability to pay.
Scott County, Tennessee, where I’m from, actually did secede from Tennessee at the start of the Civil War, and wasn’t officially readmitted to the state until the 1980s.
As far as California goes, rather than seceded, perhaps the state should be ejected from the Union.
“we need a prenup”
Shout it from the rooftops.
If California decides to repatriate to Mexico or to go its own way, it should be able to do so without the US fighting another civil way.
Definitely something we need a convention of states to address. Perhaps as a trade off for eliminating the electoral college and allotting House and Senate seats based upon popular vote by party, state interests could be protected by providing them with a clear constitutional exit process.
This problem with SS seems pretty simple to me. If benefits are paid from current tax revenue, why wouldn’t California take their seniors off the Federal rolls and put them on California’s rolls? Then the tax revenue which would have gone to the Feds can be used to pay Cal’s SS benefits.
What am I missing? Of course the full mechanics would be horrendously complicated, but is that what we’re trying to talk about here? It doesn’t seem much of a problem in principle.