SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the you-can-go-your-own-way-♩♫♩♫ dept.
Supporters of a plan for California to secede from the union took their first formal step Monday morning, submitting a proposed ballot measure to the state attorney general's office in the hopes of a statewide vote as soon as 2018.
Marcus Ruiz Evans, the vice president and co-founder of Yes California, said his group had been planning to wait for a later election, but the presidential election of Donald Trump sped up the timeline.
"We're doing it now because of all of the overwhelming attention," Evans said.
The Yes California group has been around for more than two years, Evans said. It is based around California taxpayers paying more money to the federal government than the state receives in spending, that Californians are culturally different from the rest of the country, and that national media and organizations routinely criticize Californians for being out of step with the rest of the U.S.
Could California go it alone?
(Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:22PM
IMO, the federal government would be even less willing to appear as the aggressor, but it's hard to say.
Agreed. Modern media makes war unseemly and most Americans will identify with Californians more than they will Iraqis, realistically. I model the federal government as being willing to pull a Gulf of Tonkin out of their ass when they want a war bad enough, but even if I'm correct in this modeling it adds a higher cost to the war in terms of potential blowback.
Certainly resupply of US military bases would be harder to stop, so I'm inclined to think it would settle into a stalemate, with Federal installations supplied by airlift indefinitely, but there's any number of ways either side could bring it to war if they chose.
This is an interesting scenario waiting to boil over. Essentially, certain pockets of California would be permanently occupied by an outside military force -- a direct challenge to their sovereignty. I like your Sumter comparison.
I suspect California is too big of an asset for them to give up without a fight, but I could see the standoff lasting a while. Hopefully, it could even cool down in time. Maybe once Cali is a legitimate MAD threat in its own right? I'm still giving it low odds.