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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: 5, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:10PM
History lesson:
As you can see, secession did not immediately lead to war, and the inability to come to agreement over Federal installations within the seceded states could have been prolonged indefinitely without coming to blows, if both sides had been willing to let it.
That might or might not play out similarly today -- IMO, the federal government would be even less willing to appear as the aggressor, but it's hard to say. 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.
(It's a little interesting to contemplate what might have happened if Sumter had come up a few days shorter on supplies, and thus been forced to surrender before the bombardment; however, the war would almost certainly have arced over somewhere else, because an underlying problem was that both sides were a little too sure they could easily win, and thus a little too unwilling to settle for compromise/stalemate.)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday November 23 2016, @07:27PM
> an underlying problem was that both sides were a little too sure they could easily win, and thus a little too unwilling to settle for compromise/stalemate.
That's how the best world wars always get started.
Note that with almost 40 million people, CA is getting a bit too big for a US military operation. The sweet spot has been for decades about 20 to 30 million.
(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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @03:53AM
As you can see, secession did not immediately lead to war, and the inability to come to agreement over Federal installations within the seceded states could have been prolonged indefinitely without coming to blows, if both sides had been willing to let it.
It was an untenable situation. The number of weeks or months that the crisis dragged on is immaterial - everyone on both sides knew that either capitulation or fighting was inevitable.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @05:39AM
As you can see, secession did not immediately lead to war, and the inability to come to agreement over Federal installations within the seceded states could have been prolonged indefinitely without coming to blows, if both sides had been willing to let it.
It was an untenable situation. The number of weeks or months that the crisis dragged on is immaterial - everyone on both sides knew that either capitulation or fighting was inevitable.
A lot of people knew that about the Cold War, too.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @03:13PM
Gorbachev blinked
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 24 2016, @03:14PM
It was an untenable situation. The number of weeks or months that the crisis dragged on is immaterial - everyone on both sides knew that either capitulation or fighting was inevitable.
If you're speaking of the situation before the US Civil War, no they didn't know that because fighting wasn't inevitable and delay was advantageous. For example, the longer that the Confederacy could prevent war, the better their odds of lining up a European ally willing to commit troops (even token amounts would suffice), the more likely that the US would be to acknowledge the situation without a fight, and there was also a possibility of still getting Kentucky, Maryland, or Missouri to join the Confederacy as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 24 2016, @03:44PM
I did say either capitulation or fighting was inevitable.
The Union fort doesn't just go away as time passes.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday November 25 2016, @02:55PM
The Union fort doesn't just go away as time passes.
Germany has a similar problem, yet they manage to muddle through the day.