CalExit May Be on the Ballot in 2028
Like the 2017 attempt, this one is fueled by Trump-hate.
![](https://c1.legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/LI-038-CalExit.png)
From time to time, I have covered the CalExit movement at Legal Insurrection.
In a nutshell, back in 2017, in a wave of euphoria over Brexit, there was a move for California to become an autonomous region.
The move was driven by Trump-hate and run at that time by an American living in Russia.
The movement fizzled. While it was a very popular idea among people across the country, only 32% of Californians were game to give up their citizenship. Also, the backer decided he wanted to seek permanent residence in Russia.
Now CalExit may be back on the ballot.
California is currently in the process of potentially putting a measure on the 2028 ballot that would ask voters if the state should leave the United States and become an independent country. This initiative has been cleared by California Secretary of State Shirley Weber for signature gathering.
Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced Thursday that a measure introduced by Marcus Evans of Fresno must receive more than 500,000 signatures by late July.
According to the text of the measure, the state would be required to create a 20-member state commission to study California’s viability as an independent country in 2027 and to publish a report the following year.
Members of the commission, who would be picked at random by the Secretary of State, would have to meet certain requirements, such as being nominated by 100 registered voters and must have California residency for at least five years.
Like the 2017 attempt, this one is fueled by Trump-hate.
This time around, people were still watching votes come in on Election Day when Marcus Ruiz Evans, the movement’s founder, filed paperwork to start the succession process.
“Trump’s face makes it real in a way that we can’t explain to the average Californian… his reelection absolutely has something to do with this,” Ruiz Evans said.
Chris Micheli, a McGeorge School of Law professor and a California Capitol inside, suggests President Trump’s recent actions could help proponents gather enough signatures.
“I think a proposal like this becomes more mainstream and takes on more legs the more that Californians feel disenfranchised or otherwise at odds with what is going on at the federal level,” Micheli said.
That was before Trump came to town to help push the recovery efforts from the Greater Los Angeles Wildfires. The state has likely been a little redder as a result of that disaster.
While the effort is likely to be as fruitless as the last attempt, I could see it meeting the requirement that 2/3rds of the other states would agree to the exit.
The secession would require a constitutional amendment which would need approval from two-thirds of the states.
The proposal would declare a “vote of no confidence in the United States of America” — without changing the state’s government or its relationship with the U.S.
Keep in mind that Section 1 of Article III of the current State Constitution states that California “is an inseparable part of the United States of America.”
I know I shouldn’t threaten Legal Insurrection readers with a good time.
https://t.co/BiYMO8s8pt pic.twitter.com/eTmJHrmzXO
— Leslie Eastman ☥ (@Mutnodjmet) January 29, 2025
![](https://c1.legalinsurrection.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/subscribe-ad.jpg)
Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.
Comments
Two thirds?! I don’t expect better from whichever ignoramus at Fox 11 Digital Team wrote that story, but I expect you to know better.
It would take an amendment to the U.S.A. Constitution, which requires approval by 3/4 of the states.
Exactly. I don’t expect the ignoramuses at Fox to know that. I expect more from Leslie Eastman, who has shown herself to be the exact opposite of an ignoramus. This is a very rare slip on her part.
And so you choose to be an asshole about it.
Forest for the trees Milhouse. The joke still lands because the rest of the country has a pretty low opinion of Failifornia.
On the immortal words of Mel Brooks portraying an Indian (hmm – autocomplete suggests Indigenous) chief In Blazing Saddles, “Lez ‘em gae!”
I noticed that the usual idiots appear to have downvoted you for knowing the law and daring to state it.
Must be a day ending in “y.”
So not Shabbos![🙂](https://s.w.org/images/core/emoji/15.0.3/svg/1f642.svg)
It has nothing to do with him being right. It’s because has a raging asshole in his pompous “I’m better than you” posture Milquetoast always takes.
Seems to be great sport for folks to downtick Milhouse. I have seen some of his comments that have no more controversy than saying “The old Chevy across the street is blue.”
He has a tendency to go after people seemingly on purpose to rile them up. I don’t know if he can help it or not.
That does not win you a lot of friends.
Tsk, tsk. What’s one twelfth among friends? After all, Kenya is close enough to Hawaii.
Where can I donate to their efforts?
If they are leaving in a mere four years why should the rest of us pay $100B to rebuild Los Angeles from the damage of the fires?
My thoughts exactly
Please read the article before commenting. Nobody’s leaving in four years. This measure, if it gets 546,651 signatures by July 22, and if it then passes a referendum, would merely create a commission to start meeting in August 2027 and produce a report in 2028. It would then put a question on the ballot in 2028 simply asking Californians whether they even want to leave.
If that question gets a 55% “yes” vote, then the national flag would be removed from all state buildings and properties, and… nothing else. The Californian voters would have expressed their opinion, and the world would know what they wanted, and that’s it. There is nothing more Californians can do about it.
If it were to pass, then presumably some of California’s congressmen might introduce a resolution for a constitutional amendment. Or they might not. No one can compel or order them to. Then it would need to go through the usual amendment process, which means it would be almost guaranteed to fail.
Milhouse I come to you for a quick answer. (I don’t think it will ever come to fruition) So California wants out. And they get what they want. Now there is quite a bit of land that is owned by the federal government in California. Including, but not limited to, National forests, watersheds, the land under the Hetch Hetchy reservoir. The naval petroleum reserve. And all the military bases. California would only control their coast line to the 12 mile limit. Now we could start drilling for all that oil under the Pacific right off shore. Control all of their water, etc.. Plus they added bonus of never having to send them another dime of federal money. Not sure the emotional children pushing this have thought it all the way through.
There are losses and gains on both sides. CA provides tremendous resources but also comes at an enormous burden due to their self-indulgence in idiotic unsustainable policy.
The US probably doesn’t want to lose CA but the majority of the people could easily fall into the ocean and not many would care.
Faster please….
California can’t afford being a state as they are in serious debt. Turn off money coming from DC and they would be belly up within 5 years.
Not only turn off the money but declare immediate sanctions including oil, electricity, water etc and 100 % tariffs on all trade. Good luck with that.
Put this in perspective.
1. Most of the state thinks it’s nuts.
2. The DNC could never win a majority in DC without Liberalfornia.
I say before this happens the power hungry in DC stomp it out.
You don’t get to leave. The Civil War settled that.
You do if a constitutional amendment passes allowing you to. And that’s all this anticipates.
Correct. No state may unilaterally withdraw from the Union.
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/74/700/
This “Calexit” conceit is such a perfect encapsulation of Commiefornia Dhimmi-crats’ malignant narcissism and arrogance.
The state has a large GDP courtesy of the presence of many firms/companies in the venture capital, biotech, technology and TV/film production realms, but, water scarcity, soaring electricity costs, incompetent/derelict state and local governance and onerous taxation and regulation mean that many companies are moving to more financially hospitable climes.
The state’s resident tax base is also decidedly unhealthy, with the majority of tax receipts derived from the super-wealthy, a fleeing middle class providing modest tax revenue, and, a huge and burgeoning entitlement/welfare class on the bottom — swelled by ever-increasing numbers of illegal aliens — paying nothing into the state treasury, but, reaping generous benefits. Native Californian, Victor Davis Hanson, has written a lot about this phenomenon.
All of this is to say that Commifornia’s long-term fiscal picture and outlook are decidedly less rosy than they appear at first blush.
During the Cold War pictures and stories of people fleeing Communist oppression caused the most damage to the Communists’ cause than anything else.
If the People’s Democratic Republic of California actually pulls it off and becomes its own country we could expect a repeat of such pictures and stories. That would be the last thing Líder Máximo Newsom and the PDRC would want to have happen.
Hell, no!
Build! The! Wall!
Build! The! Wall!
Build! The! Wall!
But would east California, which votes Republican, want to stay part of an independent California?
Would it be possible to divide the state in two letting the Democrat coast become independent whilst keeping the rest of California?
And no I don’t believe Democrats would tolerate Republicans seceding from ‘their territory’ but if California can quit the Union why can’t the eastern counties quit California?
Assuming this got that far, that would be part of the negotiations to try to frame a constitutional amendment with a chance of passing.
West Virginia comes to mind.
West Virginia was created with the consent of the legitimate Virginia legislature, as required by Art. 4 § 3.
In this case there would be a constitutional amendment anyway, so it wouldn’t formally need the consent of the newly independent CA. But in order to have chance of passing, the amendment would have to have bipartisan appeal, so there would have to be something in it for everyone. An amendment that didn’t have the CA legislature on board would probably not go anywhere.
Why stop at two? How about four: North, Central (or East), Southern, and Coastal. Then you may have three red and one blue when it comes to congressional voting.
We visited Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky back in 2017. As we’re gathering for the tour, the park ranger asked everyone where they were from. When said California, he said, “welcome to the United States”. It might be easier than we think to get 3/4 of the states to agree to let them go. But I don’t see it happening, it would decimate the national Democrat party and funding and cost them a mostly democrat Congressional delegation. So such an amendment would never get out of Congress.
“cost them a mostly democrat Congressional delegation”
Not to mention a boatload of electoral votes, guaranteeing Republican rule in the rest of the US forever, or at least a really, really long time.
Though they’d still be almost where they are now in the senate. They could count on getting a majority there every so often, just as now.
When I was re-entering the US from Canada years ago the Agent asked me what Country I was from, without thinking I said “Vermont”. She gave me a puzzled look for a second then we both started laughing.
Well, Vermont used to be an independent country, just like Texas and Hawaii.
“the park ranger asked everyone where they were from. When said California, he said, “welcome to the United States”
How interesting. I had exactly the converse experience when we visited Sutter’s Mill in 1999, and the park ranger proudly told the crowd that of all the countries in the world, California had the 8th(?) largest GNP. Pretty cheeky, we all thought.
That is interesting. I was born in California and lived there all of my first 63 years, til fleeing to Idaho four years ago. Only toward the end did it feel like a different country, but not in a good way. I never ran across anyone who referred to it as a separate country. Of course I was in SoCal, people near the Bay and Sac might think differently.
Californians are very proud of that and think that makes them untouchable for all of their other faults. The rest of the US thinks otherwise.
I think the question of Secession was answered about 160 years ago.
The question of secession was clouded by an act of war, resulting in the United States’ annexation of defeated enemy territory. Because that territory had once been made up of Union member States, and because those States were re-established, it gave the situation an appearance (of the re-establishment of the old Union) it didn’t warrant (it was the forced establishment of a new union). Naturally, the supreme court of the conquering nation decided that secession isn’t permitted. I call BS. If an involuntary union (between the Colonies and the Crown) can be severed by a genuine act of the people and result in a legitimate country (the United States of America), then a voluntary union can likewise be quit. To not recognize the South’s authority to secede from the United States was tantamount to a declaration that the foundation of the United States itself was illegitimate (because the declaration of independence by the Colonies was unlawful), making the court’s opinion similarly illegitimate.
Every state agreed to operate as specified by the constitution. The constitution doesn’t have any mechanism that enables a member state to leave the union. Therefore to leave the union a state can.violate the constitution like the Southern states did at the start of the civil war or change the constitution to allow it. Alternatively, they could pack the court so the SC can”interpret” it to mean what ever they want.
If the South wanted to assert a natural right to secede, they kind of pulled the rug out from under themselves when they wrote their new constitution explicitly forbidding states to secede from the CSA. That didn’t affect their legal argument, but it certainly undermined their moral argument.
If a state can secede with a mere legislative vote then there is no union and there never was. An election doesn’t go the way you want? Vote yourselves out of the country. It’s a recipe for endless balkanization as states leave and/or divide into smaller states. The process to join the union is (by necessity) difficult. Leaving should be equally as difficult.
The Confederates made no such attempt. Upon the election of Lincoln they simply declared “We’re out.”
I have zero sympathy for the southerners. They broke away to protect their “peculiar institution” after the election of an anti-slavery candidate, they started a war they couldn’t hope to win against a more populous, more industrial, and wealthier enemy, and they unsurprisingly lost. And then they spent the next hundred years attempting to keep their boots on the necks of black people.
The process to join is not difficult at all. All it takes is an act of Congress, just like any of the dozens of laws Congress passes every year.
So if that were the standard for leaving, then that shouldn’t be difficult either.
“I think the question of Secession was answered about 160 years ago.”
So, can you list for me some other political questions that are properly answered by the principle of “might makes right?”
The actual principle is “fuck around and find out.” The southerners started a war with a wealthier, more heavily populated, and more industrial enemy. Not a great plan. And given the southerners’ cheerful willingness to hold human beings in chains they certainly believed in “might makes right” themselves.
To be fair, the “holding human beings in chains” thing was the established law of the land — including parts of the “north” — for over a century.
Personally, I find the principle of “once you join you can never leave” more suited to a street gang or mafia than a political association of free individuals. For a principle established by Republicans, I’m sure the Democrats wish they could enforce it on their members. That’s what really burns them about Tulsi, RFKJ, and (most of all) Trump.
Ain’t nuthin’ gonna happen. For one thing, all those Tech companies? I don’t think that it would be advantageous to them to lose untaxed access to the American market. I would also expect that their tax burden would increase sharply as any U.S. federal funding received in the state would have be replaced.
I would imagine that a lot of them would move to another location -inside- the United States.
That’s a hard prediction to make. The workers for those tech companies are overwhelmingly the very diaper babies most eager to live in a new socialist country all their own.
California seceding does NOT require any Constitutional amendment. Any state can secede if it wants. However, as in the Civil War (which was not a “civil war”) the United States can then go and take over the new country and force it back into the Union.
That was the Confederates’ opinion. The Union and its supreme court disagreed, and held that the constitution, by failing to provide a mechanism for secession, prohibits it altogether.
Of course if CA secedes then it will no longer have any obligation to obey the constitution. So it could just declare that it’s no longer bound by the union or its laws, and it doesn’t care what the constitution says. Then it would be up to the union what to do about it. I can’t see any modern president going to war over it.
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable, a most sacred right — a right which we hope and believe is to liberate the world. Nor is this right confined to cases in which the whole people of an existing government may choose to exercise it. Any portion of such people, that can, may revolutionize, and make their own of so much of the territory as they inhabit. More than this, a majority of any portion of such people may revolutionize, putting down a minority, intermingled with, or near about them, who may oppose their movement. Such minority, was precisely the case, of the tories of our own revolution. It is a quality of revolutions not to go by old lines, or old laws; but to break up both, and make new ones.
–ABRAHAM LINCOLN
“Everything not forbidden is compulsory.”
Meh. This is just another effort by the Communist satraps who run the People’s Democratic Republic of California to divert the proles’ attention from the state’ government’s massive screwups.
The Communists can’t keep the lights on, make water flow to the fire hydrants, clean garbage off the streets, fix the billion and one potholes in the roads, teach the kids the Three Rs, fight crime, or put out fires. Heck – they can’t even hold legitimate elections and count votes properly. But they sure know how to virtue-signal and get everybody talking about it!
I suspect the fool who travels this trail does not understand that currently one hundred percent of California’s trade is actually with and by the rest of America.
No, it isn’t. Californians do a lot of importing and exporting. I doubt there are any states that do no international trade, but California doesn’t even come close to that.
I think both of you are right. You are obviously correct, that CA’s vast coast makes for a vast international shipping lane for trade.
However, all international trade is by nation, not by state. It’s not legal for any state to negotiate internationally for trade conditions. Therefore, there’s no such thing as a single state participating in international trade. If Milhouse is saying that CA, if independent, would participate in a lot of international trade, then that is very likely to be true.
I’ll add further that all trade outside of CA in this independent scenario would be ‘international” by definition.
However, it would likely be more cost effective to trade with the US than with nations across the Pacific if all other factors are held equal.
Screaming at the sky by outraged soy bois. While there is no specific clause in the Constitution that the United States should exist in perpetuity, it is widely believed especially after the Civil War that a State or States can’t simply declare themselves out. California could vote to leave, then it would have to go back to Congress to set the rules for succession, which would take years, they would most likely require a 3/4 majority of all the States to approve which would again take years as States can’t be required to even take it up. Even if that happened negotiations on all the laws, separation payments, defense treaties etc would take further decades. Just not going to happen.
I suspect that the succession movement to form Greater Idaho is a template as to how long, just for starters, it would take just to get off the ground and that process is even spelled out.
Most of California by area is red. Why not let the very large, very crazy counties exit? Maybe 15 Blue counties.
An interesting historical rhyme. Back in the day, the wisdom was that for a westerner or free-world foreigner, traversing East Germany was no more than a minor hassle, easier than navigating TSA. But going into East Berlin was ill-advised, by at least two orders of magnitude of grief.
Then, as now, it’s the cities (or in CA, the overpopulated counties surrounding them) that you have to beware, because that’s where the big loony always breeds.
Sure. Go ahead but a few caveats. Hold it on a County basis. Let the Counties who seek to remain join another exiting contiguous State. Let the contiguous Counties who opt to leave the USA do so.
The downside to that is an huge increase to the dedicated loony seats in the Senate.
There is also a movement called New California whereby the non-coastal counties would apply as a new state as did West Virginia around the time of the civil war.
That would require the CA legislature’s consent, and I don’t see why it would ever want to agree to that.
This is perfect. After California leaves we declare war on it, and after victory, appoint a viceroy to implement conservative order.
So a state that is in debt will somehow be able to afford their own military and protect their borders? I don’t think so. I think within 30 days Mexico will claim them as a territory.
All I can say is I expect that after President Trump appoints Viceroy Palin to oversee the reconstruction of California, she’ll put in a Herculean effort to return California to a functioning member of the Republic.
The 50% tariff is going to put a little bite in there eco.
If they want to be independent, remind them the Colorado River is not in California. And let the State of Jefferson separate from them, they don’t have much in common with Newsom and his ilk.
Imagine what they would pay for their ‘imported’ electricity.
Will they have open borders?
Not if I can help it.