I have a feeling that would be disastrous to the prospects of any Democrat trying to win the presidency. AFAIK, the 270 threshold would still exist, but Dems would have to then dig up 53 to 56 (depending on population swings) extra electoral college votes from elsewhere in the country to make up for the loss of CA’s electors. In this political climate, I’m not entirely sure that’s even possible.
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Just in case anyone thinks #calexit is a good idea: Trump and Bannon are in favor of it.
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Trump wants to go down in history as the new Lord North, evidently.
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The Mormon church is pretty split too, not everyone agrees with the agenda against gay marriage and other political activities with the church’s money. A lot more diverse opinions than what I know of evangelicals anyways.
But again, it was a joke talking about the population of CA taking out the vote of some flyover states.
Thanks. I misused the word, although both seem to be landscaping for low water use. Apparently “zeroscaping” involves using lots of rocks and gravel, while “xeriscaping” uses native plants.
Ironically, the Republicans want to turn control over Federal lands to the states (so they can be raped and pillaged by industry more easily). Thus making that less of an issue.
However, given that the “leader” of CalExit is a Republican in love with Russia, I don’t really even see this as a fun exercise to consider.
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It is important to understand that even three states away, the use of the river that runs through my property is subject to very careful scrutiny, and constant legal challenges about exactly how much water has to be apportioned to who, especially the state of California.
It may be that California’s use of rocky mountain water is overstated. But it does seem accurate to say that even a small reduction of the water made available there would have a large impact.
The people in the 'states are going on what? their 7th decade of an ever tightening spiral of consumption and loss of agency…
They finally elected a half way decent leader in obama, who did halfway decent stuff, and now there’s recoil against that work in the form of trump.
And how many people over the years have been kicked off the edge of that spiral, having found that they cannot afford healthcare, that one small disaster like three feet of water in the basement started an inescapable failstate that burned their lives.
Sorry about the wall of text but, well, the country has had many generations of protests, petitions, affirmative actions, meetings, lectures…and now trump is getting elected.
My point, I think, is this: Everything else is failing to improve the situation, and when that state manifests, I think stronger measures become justified.
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It seems to me if one agrees with Lincoln’s argument for fighting the Civil War, that states do not in fact have the right to secede, then one should not support Calexit either. It doesn’t really matter that we may consider California’s reasons for secession better than the Confederate States’.
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Can’t I take a joke and run with it?!?!
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I’m not sure the elite abandoning ship is the right move. The elite, the ones with the greatest access to capital and mobility helped get us here, and now they are hunkering down and fleeing to carefully guarded locations, as if they had nothing to do with it.
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For what it’s worth, the @RoguePOTUSStaff twitter account, which so far has been an interesting narrative that may or may not be an actual rogue staffer, posted this:
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I call that argument bullshit because it so quickly reduces to absurdity. After richer states separate themselves from poorer ones, why wouldn’t richer counties separate from poorer ones? What about neighbourhoods, what about people?
The whole idea of living in a society is that we all work together and that is going to manifest as some people doing more work than others. If you follow dollars then to argue you ought to get more out of it than you put in is to argue that someone else ought to get less, which is stupid; and to argue you ought to get the same amount is that there should be no exchange at all, which is pretty close to assuming the conclusion in favour of secession.
The point is that we shouldn’t be tracking dollars but instead looking at value created. It ought to be the case that everyone gets more out than they put in, and we just don’t have the sophistication to measure that in dollars.
So I think @jlw is exactly right - the point is how the Feds use the money. If they are using the money to arrest and prosecute people for possession of pot in states that have passed laws to allow it, they aren’t creating any value, they are actually obliterating value. If they are using it to apply rules to public schools that make it harder to educate children then again, they are hurting states, not helping them. If they are fixing federally owned infrastructure and implementing a national single payer healthcare system then they are creating considerably more value than is being paid in, enough to share back with everyone.
If we don’t believe that we can pool our money to make everyone better off then we ought to start whittling our own spears to hunt in the jungle. I think the “pay in more than we get back” argument goes down that road. So it’s not that i think it doesn’t happen or that it unreservedly should, I just think counting dollars in vs. dollars out is meaningless.
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I understand that’s the actual thing being voted on. I think most people aren’t close readers of laws and will see this more as a “secession vote #1” while scratching their heads about why there has to be two. I think the argument that this isn’t really secession will be the argument of the “Yes” side and the argument that it inevitably leads to secession will be the argument of the “No” side if this does make it on the ballot.
Thank you! I’ve been saying for a bit now that we’ve landed somewhere between Snow Crash and the background behind Neuromancer.
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yeah but whoever is there votes republican. leave em behind.
Ugh, someone recently spoke up at the Seattle City Council and brought up their plan to secede (though they pronounced it succeed) and oh no!
The GOP is so very scared of your proclamations of States Rights, you possibly well-meaning but not very leftist appeals to individualism.
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