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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: 1) by khallow on Thursday November 24 2016, @12:47PM
Some folks have redrawn the map of the USA, divided into 50 equal divisions by population.
That would be another nail in the coffin for the division of power from federalism. Currently, a senator represents a state not some arbitrary division of people. And of course, I guess we haven't yet learned of the perils of gerrymandering? The power of the Senate gets transferred to who is in control of allotting these senate divisions.
I'll note that these these matters are routine rural/urban conflicts and as a result, a strong reason for the Senate and Electoral College still exists: to give rural areas a voice. In other words, some of the same reason these things existed in the first place still persist.
We really do need a Constitutional Convention to rework a whole bunch of outdated ideas that are still in the centuries-old founding document.
There are two problems with this assertion. First, the convention would have to be called for by at least two thirds of the states (currently 34 states). That means that you would have to include a fair portion of the states whose interests are being acted against by this convention. Second, so what if there's a few outdated ideas in the document? What makes you think everyone is going to agree on which ideas are the outdated ones? For example, some might think that the Second Amendment is outdated while others might think direct vote of US senators is outdated (and instead require senators to be appointed by governors of the states which incidentally neatly eliminates your concern about the Senate while making the Senate more like the EU's Council of the European Union).
My view is that instead of making a mess that nobody will like (and which only a tyranny could pass), use focused amendments that consist of the desired change as well as the necessary political bribes to induce parties to vote or secondary changes (so you aren't stuck in some terrible intermediate state).