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Secessionists Formally Launch Quest for California's Independence

posted by martyb on Wednesday November 23 2016, @05:25PM   
from the you-can-go-your-own-way-♩♫♩♫ dept.

Phoenix666 writes:

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?

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Original Submission

• Re:Senatorial districts (Score: 2) by BK on Thursday November 24 2016, @06:01AM

  by BK (4868) on Thursday November 24 2016, @06:01AM (#432303)

  We really do need a Constitutional Convention to rework a whole bunch of outdated ideas that are still in the centuries-old founding document.

  OK. Agreed. But replace them with what and how... ? Yes, that's the purpose of the convention, but it's not nearly that simple.

  From CNN [cnn.com]:

  We've already had one constitutional convention -- literally The Constitutional Convention, in 1787, which gave us the Constitution -- and there hasn't been one since.
  The document itself lays out the rules for calling a convention -- two-thirds of the states, or 34, have to petition Congress to call the meeting, according to Article V of the Constitution. But from there, it's open to interpretation -- and battling. Does each state get two delegates to send to the convention or do they get a number proportional to their population? Those are the kinds of questions that could make agreeing to a convention almost impossible.
  Despite the long odds, a group of lawmakers -- mostly Republicans -- have been meeting since 2013 to come up with guidelines to prevent total chaos.
  That group, The Assembly of State Legislatures, approved a detailed package of rules this year -- outlining everything from who would lead the group to how proposals would be debated.

  A convention may not give you the changes you want. You may not get the rules you want. When time comes to compromise...

  --
  ...but you HAVE heard of me.

  Parent

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