California residents will be allowed to vote on a proposal to split their state into three pieces.
The “CAL 3” initiative is not eligible to be included on the general election ballot in November. 402,468 signatures were necessary for the proposal to be included on the ballot. The California Secretary of State’s office said that number had been reached, although they wouldn’t say exactly how many signatures had been garnered.
California has a long history of general referendum votes on matters of real importance to the state. Perhaps most famously, Proposition 8, a law banning same-sex marriage, was passed through the referendum method during the November 2008 California state elections. Proposition 8 was eventually declared unconstitutional by the courts, however.
It’s likely that CAL 3 would meet the same fate.
Still, it’s interesting to consider the idea that a law passed by referendum in a midterm year could have such massive impacts. The CAL 3 proposal has been spearheaded by venture capitalist Tim Draper. It ultimately aims to cut the state of California into three territories with roughly equal populations.
Those three new states would be called Northern California, Southern California, and California. Northern California would include all the territory between the Bay Area and the border into Oregon. Southern California would start in Fresno, and would contain most of the southern part of the state.
And “California” would cover LA and the coastal regions below San Francisco.
According to official statements made by his office, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla will certify the CAL 3 initiative for inclusion on the November ballot on June 28th.
This marks the third time Tim Draper has tried to get his “chop up California into bite-size-chunks” idea included on a California ballot. He proposed similar ideas in 2012 and 2014, but the California government declared many of the signatures he had collected to be invalid.
Now, though, Draper and his team have finally collected enough signatures to force the Californian government to put the measure on the ballot come November.
Tim Draper’s first plan, in 2014, was called “Six Californias.” Predictably, that plan would have divided California into – wait for it – six smaller states. Unsurprisingly, the public didn’t really support that idea.
But cutting California into three states actually makes a lot of sense. Especially when the three proposed states are already more of less how California is divided geographically, politically, and economically.
Coastal California is a very different place from Northern California, which is a very different place from Southern California. People already refer to Northern and Southern California almost as if they were their own states. And LA is effectively a city-state of its own at this point.
It’s not like this is a totally unprecedented thing, either. Lots of U.S. states have been formed as offshoots or split-offs from other states, including Tennessee, Kentucky, Vermont, and Maine. The most recent such case was in 1863, when West Virginia was formed from the loyalist parts of Virginia that split off from the Confederacy during the Civil War.
So while it’s been more than a hundred years since the last state-split, it’s not as if this proposal were totally unheard-of or unconstitutional.
What’s more, California is genuinely too large for its own good. The state’s welfare system is heavily weighed-down by certain portions of the state which are dealing with major crime and immigration issues. Southern Californian hospitals, for examples, are put under extreme strain as a result of illegal immigration.
And even if the people in that region of California wanted to fix that problem (and many do), their hands are tied by the ivory-tower liberalism that stems from LA and San Francisco. Those population-dense bastions of liberalism effectively control the state legislature.
In terms of national politics, the votes of Republicans in California are literally meaningless, even though as a matter of sheer numbers there are a lot of Republicans in the state, especially in the rural northern and southern parts.
Those thousands of Republican voters either don’t show up to vote because they know their votes are meaningless, or they vote anyway because they believe it’s their duty, and are forced to watch as their liberal city-dominated state strays further down the path towards socialism and ruin.
Splitting California three ways would restore political representation to those parts of the state that aren’t drinking the liberal cool-aid. If California were split three ways, there would probably be at least two or three new Republican senators and dozens of new Republican house members in Congress.
It’s no wonder, then, that there’s a legion of leftoid elites raising hell over this ballot initiative. It’ll be interesting to see whether the CAL 3 proposition passes, and if it does, whether the California government will heed the expressed will of the people, or try to put a stop to their wishes.
