California Split

May 23, 2009 by Robert Nedelkoff | Filed Under American Politics, California politics, U.S. History 

The title of this post comes from one of Robert Altman’s less-remembered films (albeit one somewhat more entertaining than, say, Quintet or whatever that futuristic one with Paul Newman was called). Anyway, it seems fitting to borrow it when discussing a blogpost by Martin Hutchinson which has caused some stir in online circles in recent days.

The post proposes solving the Golden State’s myriad problems by dividing it into four separate states. The southernmost would comprise the San Diego area, Orange County, and the Imperial Valley. Greater Los Angeles (that is to say, LA city and county, plus the coastline going up to around Santa Barbara) would be another state. The third state would comprise the Bay Area up to Sonoma, Silicon Valley, the corridor up to Sacramento, and Santa Cruz County. The northernmost part would include the remainder of the state.

This is hardly the first time such notions have been tossed around. In 1860, after the efforts of Southern sympathizers to break off California and Oregon from the Union were frustrated, there was talk of trying to split the southern half of the state from the northern one, but this came to nothing.

And for eight weeks in the fall of 1941, citizens of California’s northernmost counties, in cooperation with some of the residents of Oregon’s southwestern region, participated in rallies calling for the establishment of a separate State of Jefferson. This movement managed to gain national press at the beginning of December, but was promptly forgotten when bulletins arrived about Pearl Harbor, though in recent years several dozen websites have celebrated the movement and called for a reexamination of this particular secession proposal.

Hutchinson’s post is rather sketchy about just how this four-way split would be put into action. The legislative approach he outlines is of questionable constitutionality.

(Indeed, the one state in the USA which definitely has the legal authority to subdivide itself is Texas. The treaty that brought the Texan Republic into the Union in 1845 specified that the state could subdivide itself into as many as five states if it chose. In 1915 there was a movement afoot to have the westernmost part of the Lone Star State break away with El Paso as the capital, and from time to time the residents of the Panhandle or the Gulf Coast mutter in similar style.)

One has to wonder if blogposts like this one make Governor Schwarzenegger nostalgic for the days when the Predator was all he had to worry about.

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