Plan to Split California into Three States May be on Next Ballot
A sign that not all Californians are represented by Sacramento.
My home state of California remains the entertainment capital of the nation!
It used to be our movie industry that captured the imagination of our fellow Americans. Now, our politics are what amazes.
This week, a plan to split California into three separate states is now making its way through the proposition process.
A plan to split California into three separate states may be on next year’s ballot.
Official paperwork was filed with the secretary of state’s office last week.
Tech billionaire Tim Draper, who came up with a six-state split in 2014, is behind the three-state plan: Northern California, Southern California” encompasses Fresno and most of Southern California.
The new California will be for part of L.A.county and most of the coastal areas.
Draper says the political and economic diversity of California is too difficult to govern.
I would argue that it is not too difficult to govern; rather, our state is being mismanaged by progressives more interested in engaging in politics at the national level and transforming Sacramento into the West Coast Washington, DC than in focusing on the less than glamorous items that make other states successful…like infrastructure, business development, and public health.
What would these states look like?
The proposed measure goes on to delineate three new states: “Northern California” (consisting essentially of the San Francisco Bay Area counties, those counties extending eastward of Bay Area, and everything north to the Oregon border); “California” (consisting of the coastal counties from Monterey to Los Angeles, inclusive); and “Southern California” (consisting of Orange and San Diego Counties, the Inland Empire, and vast majority of the Central Valley).
Each of these three new states would have more than 10 million people, making each of the three new states still among the ten biggest in the resulting nation of 52 states (a powerful reminder of Mr. Draper’s point about how large California has become.)
Who is Draper? Is he trying to become another business tycoon politician, along the lines of President Donald Trump and Tom Steyer (who funded the “Impeach Trump ad that recently aired).
Draper is a venture capitalist who is noted for his recent foray into Bitcoins. Draper also gounded Draper University of Heroes, an educational program that offers a crash course in entrepreneurship. Trying to get a better sense of Draper’s politics and motivation, I came across “Tim’s Twelve Tech Tweets to Trump“, a portion of which is below:
Reward Brexit, Modi. Cut a great free trade deal with Britain, and one with India. Send a message to the world that if your people are free, and trade fairly, you get great treatment from the USA.
Europe is overregulated and highly bureaucratic and process driven. The costs of their unification and new layers of regulation has led to stagnation. We should honor Brexit and the break from the bureaucratic EU. There are a variety of countries trying to work together to be like the United States, but where the US was built on fundamental freedoms, the EU is built on rules and regulations, which perpetrate corruption and favoritism in dealing with government.
It appears Draper is like many other Californians, who are tired of Sacaramento’s progressive policies. The difference is that Draper has the financial resources to at least offer solutions that make the ballot.
Other Californians must take a different approach. The Citizens for Fair Representation, known locally as the State of Jefferson (a group of several counties in Northern Califonia and Oregon that have petitioned to form a 51st state), has filed a lawsuit against the State of California over what they believe to be lack of representation and dilution of vote.
“Currently, 11 northern rural counties have one senator whose vote is diluted by 15 Senators representing the single County of Los Angeles,” said Citizens for Fair Representation in a press release. The organization represents residents in 21 counties.
“The thing that we really need here is liberty,” Rapoza said. “And I don’t care if you’re left wing or right wing, no one wants to just be part of the chicken.”
Rapoza is confident the group will be successful in gaining better representation as they have the standing once the lawsuit goes to court. The legal remedy, he said, will be splitting the State of California.
“The problem is that California is much too big and diverse to be a complete state.”
Supporters need 586,000 signatures to put Draper’s plan on next year’s ballot. Even if the measure passage, the split must be approved by the US Congress.
The idea of leaving California without #CalExit or moving does to another state does have its appeal, and I wish my fellow Californians much good luck. However, as the national-level Democrats will not want to part with their reliable behemoth and the GOP probably likes the idea of containing progressive insanity to one state, I am doubtful of eventual success.
However, both the proposed measure and the lawsuit are clear signs not all Californians are represented by Sacramento.
DONATE
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
I do not want California to have 6 liberal senators instead of two liberals.
3 DMVs, 3 Education Departments, 3 Immigration Departments, 3 Highway Patrol, 3 Capitol Police, 3 of everything….and they’ll get 3 portions of “fair share” of federal tax dollars from 49 other states.
With San Francisco and Oakland being part of Northern California, it assures three liberal Democratic states.
Any discussion of this plan needs to look at how the senators and representatives will change the balance of power in congress, both today and over the next 20 years with expected population changes. Also the issue of electoral votes needs to be considered.
Since that was never mentioned, this article isn’t worth reading.
This is not a DC thing, this is like getting an Amendment Ratified. The states would have to approve the Balkanization of California and there is no desire to have FOUR more California Senators in the Senate. It ain’t going to happen.
California could break itself up into three counties but that is the best that they could do.
No, it’s not like getting an amendment ratified. All it needs is a simple majority in the House, 3/5 of the senate (to avoid a filibuster), and both houses of the CA legislature.
You are right. That is unsettling that congress could decide this. Think I need to read up on Guy Fawkes.
This has all the well worn earmarks of “the nation can not remain half free and half slave” leading up to the Civil war.. NOT meaning that course .. but the same loggerhead. IF California had been transformed legitimately to progressive, I wouldn’t be complaining about the political affairs of California.
A clever attempt to get two Democratic senators net. The proper division of the state is coastal and interior, but that would net the Democrats nothing since the interior is pretty deep red.
However, this is pointless maneuvering- will never happen. Even secession will never be allowed since the Democrats in Congress would be the ones who would most vociferously oppose it.
It would not net the Ds any senators. They’d go from 2/2 to 4/6, which is a wash.
Without doing a detailed analysis it looks like Northern CA and CA would be reliably D while Southern CA would be competitive but lean R. If Rs did carry it, then the result would be that the four extra senators would split 2 each, the House delegations wouldn’t change, but the Rs would get a big advantage in the Electoral College, getting all the electors from Southern CA.
I don’t see the Ds agreeing to this unless we threw in statehood for Puerto Rico, but then I don’t see the Rs agreeing.
It would need 60 votes in the senate, but more importantly it would need the consent of the CA legislature, and I don’t think a referendum victory would help there, since the requirement is from the federal constitution, not the state one, and the federal constitution knows nothing of referendums.
PR could never handle statehood…how would they pay taxes?
By receiving an “earned income credit” check from the US Treasury.
For the entire “state”? The government can’t even pay taxes, it’s that corrupt and defunct down there and the work ethic is so bad that they’ll never be able to build the infrastructure.
Sounds like a democrat paradise.
the idea of having internal Calif split would be a good way to attempt this –
that would mean NO additional Senators and the Representatives would not be affected since they are population driven.
what Calif could do is have 3 ‘vice governors’ and a ceremonial Governor.
if this concept proves workable, then after a period of time, say 20 years, Calif can petition congress for a national convention to break up the states into 3,4,5 new states.
this can also be done for TX, NY and other large population states in order to get more “real’ representation for the citizenry and act a a safety valve.
and a lab for new concepts and ideas for workable government.
That should be what we have now – 50 separate political laboratories conducting experiments in policy over time. Each laboratory is free to adopt the “best practices” as determined by the experiments in every other lab/state. But because of an overweening central government, that does its best to impose itself and its parameters (laws and regulations) on every experiment, the experiments have been hopelessly compromised.
A visual comparison of this map with one of votes by county from the past election shows that this proposal gerrymanders CA to produce four more Progressive senators. No thanks; California does enough damage as it is.
I may be missing the point… but what’s the purpose of this split? What will be gained for tripling the government? New Northern California and “California” are demographically pretty much the same as current California. New “Southern California” will be probably pink electorally (like Virginia); so there will be visits from presidential candidates. Feels like the mayors of big cities (Los Angeles, Sand Diego, San Francisco) hope to get more power after the split.
I like the idea of secession much better (as long as I can escape to Arizona first)
Not going to happen. The Dems are not going to give up a Democrat enclave and the split would not benefit the Republicans in any real measure. If Conservatives in California really want to get out from under the Liberal/Progressive boot heel, they should simply leave the state and go to a friendlier one. The state will destroy itself in a couple of decades.
If Southern CA goes R, it gives the Rs a big benefit in the electoral college. So big that I can’t see the Ds going along without a sweetener.
There’s so much dense population in the metropolitan liberal enclaves of the state that a few strategic migration-based initiatives turn the whole thing blue.
It’s a bad deal for anyone.
*except those looking to seize the balance of power and shift it wayyyyyy to the left.
Not really. It would depend upon the population and the redistricting that occurred as to how the Electoral college would be affected. The Dems are not going to give up centralized control of any of the coastal areas. This is their power base. The inland areas have too little population to offer any advantage to the Republicans, except in the Senate. And, the Dems are not going to give the GOP an advantage there.
Any sized state that’s carved out of CA and goes R is an electoral college gain for the Rs. The bigger that state the bigger the gain. Something the size of this “Southern CA”, if the Rs can carry it, would be a huge gain, so big the Ds would never agree to it without a sweetener.
Better idea, cap membership in the House at 50 per state until 2040, and tell California to f themselves.
Unconstitutional.
No, it isn’t. It would be perfectly constitutional for Congress to do this, so long as each state’s delegation was reduced in proportion. This would be a net gain to the smaller states, because they haven’t got the granularity to lose seats under such a small reduction; a state with 4 seats would probably keep all 4, and of course no state can go under 1.
No way that the rest of us are going to accept California, which already has the lion’s share by far of the representatives in the US House, having 6 Senators instead of 2/
How many Representatives does Cali have in the House? There are a total of 435 representatives, set by law. 53 of them – or more than 12% – are from California.
It seems that many here are assuming that the GOPe will oppose extra California Democrat senators. What is that assumption based on. There are always enough Republicans who will vote with the Democrats for them to win on anything important to the Democrats.
It isn’t a matter of “impose” extra California senators of any political persuasion. It is a matter of the Constitution. Each state gets 2 senators, thus what is now one state would go from 2 to 6 if split up into three. They already have more than 12% of the House.
Better idea: banish the GOPe and send real GOP men and women to California to sway voters.
The absence of GOP activism under the GOPe in California is akin to AG Sessions abrogating his duty to Mueller.
this is a REALLY stupid idea…
which means it has a good chance of passing, and those idiots in Sacramento LOVE stupid ideas…
be afraid.
be VERY afraid
This looks more like a plan to turn the US Congress permanently Democrat.
It wouldn’t affect the House at all. And it would only affect the senate if the Ds could carry all three new states. If they only carried two then it would be a wash; they’d go from 2/2 to 4/6.
Democrats in the US Congress will make sure that this never happens.
It will kill them in the Electoral College.
From a national perspective, this is a wash for the US House – same # of Congressmen (population) representing roughly the same districts and about the same proportion of R’s to D’s (at least until the R’s win control of one of the new states and redistrict). For the US Senate, instead of 2 D’s you’d have 4 D / 2 R, again a wash.
The real problem is that the D’s would go from having 55 guaranteed Electoral College votes, without having to spend a dime campaigning, to about 2/3 of that with the other 1/3 going to the R’s. This seriously dims their prospects in future POTUS races.
Same problem doomed the previous attempt to split CA into 6 States, 2 of which would have been D, 2 R, and the other 2 swing states. The Democrat Party killed it because of its effect on their POTUS prospects.
While I’d much prefer to donate to Brexit, the three state deal isn’t going to happen either. It’s all about the water. As was explained to me by someone who was part of or watched a previous effort, Northern California would have most all of the available water. The states along the Colorado wouldn’t increase their portions to Southern California and “California” would be out of schlitz.
Dividing California is a good idea, but not in the way this map proposes. At the very least, the San Francisco Bay area should be included in the coastal section stretching down to Los Angeles county. The leftists need to be concentrated in their own state as much as possible, and not allowed to dominate the more conservative and less populated areas. I’ve seen several proposals for dividing California into various numbers of states that would probably work out pretty well, but not this one.
I agree. The 3-state proposal I saw previously had the southern quarter of the state as South California (including all of Los Angeles), the coast up to and including the Bay Area as Coastal California, and the rest as North California. All three states had a significant chunk of coastline, and while CCA stayed solid blue, NCA and SCA were projected to be purple.
Abdolutely not. Read the small print.
LA gets 2 US Senators.
SF gets 2 US Senators.
SD gets 2 US Senators.
That means DEMOCRAT control of the US Senate forever.
Only if the state that includes SD goes Democrat.
That green “Southern California” consists of San Diego … and Mono, Inyo, San Bernardino, Riverside, Imperial, Orange, Kern, Kings, Tulare, Fresno, and Madera counties.
Added together, in 2016 these counties voted 2,416,821 for the Wicked Witch and 1,961,842 for Trump. That’s a 23% win for the Donks. San Diego wasn’t close—735,476 to 477,766, a 54% win for the forces of evil.
The proposed Southern Californiastan is not likely to send many Republicans to Washington.