California against the world, part 2: Is it possible to secede?
This is the first first miniseries in a macroseries about California. Check back here regularly for updates. Subscribe to my email list so you don’t miss a thing.
A few folks in California say they want to secede. Could that ever really happen? The answer to that question depends on the answers to a few other questions. Could a resolution for independence ever win a majority of voters in California? If it could, would the rest of the U.S. allow it? If they didn’t, could a state pursue independence anyway?
Would a resolution for Californian independence ever pass?
First, a proposition would have to get on the ballot. In California, that requires nearly 600,000 legitimate signatures. That’s a lot of names, but in a state with 39 million residents, it’s really only about 1 out of 50 people.
If it did get on the ballot, the odds are it wouldn’t pass. More than two-thirds of Californians would not support a secession proposition, according to a recent poll. But there’s another way to look at those numbers. If 68% are against Calexit. Does that mean 32% of Californians are in favor of it? That would be a surprisingly high number. It is about 50% more common to support secession in California than it is in the rest of the U.S. According to one source, the national average of 22% of people wanting to secede. It’s higher in Alaska, where the Alaskan Independence party is the third most popular political group in the state. Several groups are pushing for Hawaiian independence. And last summer a move for a “Texit”, sought to capitalize on the 30% of Texans who think the state may be better off as an independent nation.
Wait. That is shocking to me. Overall, 1 in 5 people in the U.S. support secession? I couldn’t believe it so I looked into it. A poll in 2014, before Trump caught steam, found that 1 in 4 Americans wanted to secede. That’s a problem. We’ll come back to that later.
Okay so if only 32% of Californians support Calexit, the resolution will go down in flames right? Maybe not. It depends on who comes out to vote. The last elections bears this out. When you count all the people that voted for Hilary Clinton or a third party candidate and all the eligible voters who didn’t vote at all (43% of the electorate), President Trump only had 27% of American voters vote for him. If fewer than a third of voters can pick the president, then maybe a third of the voters can push through a referendum on independence.
We may chuckle at the notion that a state might actually secede (I do!) but everybody was chuckling about Brexit passing and about Trump winning before those shockers happened. The thing is, even if a secession proposition passed an election in California, the U.S. government wouldn’t recognize it as a legal action.
It’s not legal to secede from the United States — Texas taught us that
Although secessionists got excited by Brexit, there’s a big difference between the E.U. and the U.S. As the Texas Tribune explains, “the European Union is a loose association of compound states with pre-existing protocols for a nation to exit. In contrast, the U.S. Constitution contains procedures for admitting new states into the nation, but none for a state to leave.”
It’s not like people haven’t been thinking about it, especially in Texas. If you’re a young Texan thinking about Texas secession, the “Texplainer” sums up the Texan relationship with the U.S. in two nifty paragraphs:
Texas declared independence from Mexico in 1836 and spent the next nine years as its own nation. While the young country’s leaders first expressed interest in becoming a state in 1836, the Republic of Texas did not join the United States until 1845, when Congress approved the Joint Resolution for Annexing Texas to the United States.
This resolution, which stipulated that Texas could, in the future, choose to divide itself into “New States of convenient size not exceeding four in number, in addition to said State of Texas” is often a cause of confusion about the state’s ability to secede. But the language of the resolution is clear: Texas can split itself into five new states. It says nothing of splitting apart from the United States.
Of course Texas did secede from the U.S., during the American Civil War, but the Supreme Court declared that action unconstitutional. Again, The Texplainer “texplains” it:
“the U.S. Supreme Court declared that secession was not legal, and thus, even during the rebellion, Texas continued to be a state. In the 1869 case Texas v. White, the Court held that individual states could not unilaterally secede from the Union and that the acts of the insurgent Texas Legislature — even if ratified by a majority of Texans — were ‘absolutely null.’”
One-hundred years later, Justice Scalia confirmed that logic. He wrote, “If there was any constitutional issue resolved by the Civil War, it is that there is no right to secede. (Hence, in the Pledge of Allegiance, ‘one Nation, indivisible.’)”
No state can legally separate from the rest of our indivisible union of states without the consent of other states. It would require a constitutional amendment to allow for secession. To pass, that amendment would require a 2/3 majority vote in both the House and the Senate. Then 38 of the 50 state legislatures would have to ratify it. Alternatively, California rebels could attempt to call a convention of the states. If they did, 2/3 of the delegates to the convention would have to approve, followed again by 38 state legislatures.
The problem is that exactly zero out of the 38 required states would support California leaving. Here’s a list of reasons why, partly from Entrepreneur magazine :
- The U.S. economy would be much weaker. California contributes $2.5 trillion to the U.S. GDP every year. California is also growing faster than the U.S. economy (4.1% vs 2.5% in 2015)
- Our food costs would increase. If we charged tariffs on international trade we’d be in a world of hurt. Today California produces 90% of all broccoli, “99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots” — Slate
- Fewer people would see California. More than 50% of Americans don’t have passports, so we might see a lot less tourism to Napa, The Golden Gate Bridge, and Disneyland
- We’d have federal budget trouble. California currently receives 11% of federal spending but Californians pay 13% of total federal taxes.
If American history teaches us anything, it is that secession leads to Civil War. If California tried to go, they could not go quietly. In the next post: there alternatives to secession that might radically alter the make up of California and the U.S. without creating another nation.
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