The buzz around splitting up some of the states continues

You probably thought it was just me, right? I’m the crazy one saying we should allow California to break up into smaller, more manageable and representative states. (And if we tossed up some walls around a few of the cities in Snake Plissken fashion and began airdropping in food, what’s really the harm?) While we’re at it, New York City surely merits status as a state in its own right, leaving the upstate folks alone for a change.

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But that’s just crazy talk, I’m sure. Then again… it turns out I’m not the only one saying it. (Fox News)

When Donald Trump was elected, a lot of people in California signed a petition supporting the state’s secession from the U.S. It was hard to take the movement seriously—didn’t we fight a war over this?

But there is another secession movement in California, and elsewhere in America, that is getting genuine attention from political pundits. While it may be unlikely to succeed, the idea of intra-state secession—a section of a state splitting off to form its own state—has been growing in popularity. And there’s even a Constitutional procedure for doing it.

In recent decades, the political differences between rural areas and metropolitan areas seem to have become more severe. This has caused political splits in certain states, where, often, those rural areas, with lower populations, feel stifled by their city brethren.

When I responded to someone tweeting about this story earlier today, I was immediately met with the same response the quoted article used as an example. “That’s not an option! We already fought a war over this!

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Well, no. We actually didn’t. We fought a war over states seceding from the nation. What’s under discussion here is actually the process for adding more states. It’s not only constitutional, but it’s happened before. (Check out how Vermont, Maine and West Virginia joined the nation.) There’s also nothing magical about the number 50, locking us into that number of states in perpetuity. We used to add new states on a fairly regular basis up until 1959. There’s absolutely no reason we couldn’t carve out a few more.

Of course, that’s only in theory. In reality, you would need to get the state legislatures to go along with the idea first. And since the states most badly in need of being broken up are blue states, the Democrats would fight tooth and claw to stop it from happening. The result would be new red states, each with two more senators, and less power for the blue city-states which would be left behind. Since the Democrats control majorities at the state level in both of the examples I mentioned, they would never allow it to happen.

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What’s the alternative? If, like me, you happen to live the red area of a large, blue state… move. It’s taking me far too long, but that’s what I plan on doing. Drain the liberal cities of tax revenue and decrease the headcount so they have fewer seats in the House. (New York has already lost a bunch after the last few census years.) There really aren’t many better, viable options beyond that.

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