Calexit is here!!!

Los Angeles Times wrote:'Calexit' organizers can now start collecting signatures to get California secession on the ballot

Christine Mai-Duc

Supporters of the campaign for California to secede from the United States can now begin collecting the hundreds of thousands of signatures they need to get a proposed "Calexit" initiative on the ballot.

California Secretary of State Alex Padilla cleared the proposed initiative to begin collecting signatures on Thursday.

If the measure gets on the ballot and gains approval by a majority of voters, it would repeal clauses in the California Constitution stating that the state is an "inseparable part of the United States" and that the U.S. Constitution is the "supreme law of the land," according to the title and summary prepared by the state attorney general's office.

The measure would place another question on the ballot in 2019, asking whether California should become a separate country. If at least half of registered voters participate in that vote, with at least 55% of those voting to approve, the results would be treated as California's declaration of independence.

The current measure's fiscal effect is "dependent on various factors," writes the state's nonpartisan legislative analyst, and if it succeeds would result in "major, but unknown budgetary impacts."

The proposal's backers, known as Yes California, have argued that the state is culturally out of step with the rest of the U.S. and that California pays more money to the federal government than it receives in spending. The election of President Trump has only strengthened their argument, they say .

"California loses [by] being a part of America culturally and financially," said Marcus Ruiz Evans, one of the group's founders. "It could be a nation all its own, everybody knows that. The only question is if they want to break off."

It's unclear how the group will collect the required 585,407 valid signatures from registered voters over the next 180 days to qualify for the ballot.

A campaign committee, Yes California Independence Committee, has raised no funds so far, according to records from the secretary of state. But Evans says that his group has more than 7,000 volunteers (significantly down from a 13,000 estimate in December) ready to gather signatures and that voters can expect to see signature gatherers on the streets in the next couple of days.

Yes California says that even if the proposed initiative does land on the ballot and voters approve it, such an unprecedented move to secede would need to receive approval of at least a majority of the states in the union, among other legal hurdles .

Evans says he's not fazed.

"America already hates California, and America votes on emotions," he said. "I think we'd have the votes today if we held it."

UPDATE

7:01 p.m.: This post has been updated to clarify that the proposed initiative would place a future vote on California's secession on the ballot in 2019.

Now, if I can persuade the other Pacific states to join California in a Pacific States of America, we are on our way.  This is certainly a fantastic start!

 I think I'll call myself Quill, the Nation Builder.

nicko wrote:Or Quill the nation destroyer?

nicko wrote:A Naval destroyer is an Hoola Hoop  with a Nail in it !
Poor joke, but it's early in the morning here.

AP wrote:SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) – Supporters of one long-shot bid to make California an independent nation ended their effort on Monday, while another group said it will launch a new campaign for a statewide vote next year.

The drive to make the nation’s most populous state its own country, with what would be the world’s sixth-largest economy, has drawn extra interest after last year’s election of Republican Donald Trump as president.

But the Yes California Independence Campaign faltered after its president, Louis Marinelli, revealed ties to Russia. Marinelli said in a lengthy message to supporters Monday that he is seeking permanent residence in Russia because of his “frustration, disappointment and disillusionment with the United States.”

The secretary of state’s office confirmed that Marcus Ruiz Evans, the group’s vice president, withdrew the California Nationhood ballot measure.

Evans said he was leaving the Yes California group and joining the California Freedom Coalition, which he described as a grassroots organizing effort that evolved since last year’s election.

The coalition plans to file its own ballot measure in coming weeks, without the baggage of Marinelli’s Russian ties, said Steve Gonzales, the new group’s secretary-treasurer and board member.

“It prevented Yes California from getting any serious money, I can tell you that,” Gonzales said, noting that he is a native Californian who has never been to Russia. The group will accept no foreign money, and contributions from other states must be cleared by the coalition’s board, he said.

The coalition would need to collect more than 585,000 signatures to qualify a ballot measure declaring California’s independence for the November 2018 ballot. The measure is still being written, Gonzales said.

Congress and 38 states would have had to agree to change the U.S. Constitution to permit California to actually secede.

Marinelli said Yes California had fewer than 97,500 registered supporters. About 8,500 signed up as volunteers, but only about 1,200 had contributed money.

Prior to Trump’s election, the group had fewer than 100 volunteers, Marinelli said, and the group received a social media boost with Trump’s election.

Marinelli and Evans said California’s overwhelming support of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton and measures legalizing recreational marijuana and reducing crime penalties showed how far California voters were removed from the rest of the nation.

They also equated the movement to last year’s decision by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, dubbed Brexit. California, with its 39 million residents, is often compared to a nation.

Their withdrawn ballot measure would have allowed voters to repeal a part of the state Constitution saying that California is an inseparable part of the United States next year, but left the question of whether California should become a separate country to a future ballot.

Both Marinelli and Evans claimed credit for starting the Calexit campaign.

Marinelli cited his struggle with U.S. officials since 2012 over his wife’s immigration status. He praised California officials for their attempts to shield immigrant residents from deportation and said his wife now has her green card.

When California one day becomes independent, Marinelli wrote, “I shall look forward with great satisfaction to return to California and to live once again under our bear flag.”

Copyright 2017 The Associated Press.

Politics wrote:How California could secede from the US relatively easily

James Poulos, Foreign Policy
Feb. 25, 2017



With the election of Donald Trump and the backlash to some of his early moves in office, Americans are rediscovering nationalism. But confusion reigns over what American nationalism really is. Does it have to be federalist, for instance? Does it have to be liberal? In one of the great ironies of the political season, these kinds of questions are thrown into sharp relief by the strangest nationalist movement now underway — in California.

Drawing inspiration from breakaway groups in Europe, organizations like the "Yes California movement and the California National Party want to peaceably, legally transform the West Coast of the United States into a "pragmatic progressive paradise.

From one angle, California nationalism, and this particular expression of it, makes perfect sense. Despite marked divides between its northern and southern halves, the Golden State has always nourished its own identity. That stamp was apparent even when Californians played a leading role in fueling all-American patriotism, from the early days of the space program to the closing days of the Ronald Reagan administration.

But now California's cultural and political leanings have begun to shift away from most of the rest of the country. At a time when only five states in the union boast both Democratic governors and majorities in the state legislature, California is the last place in America where the political left rules unimpeded over a society and an economy large enough to prosper as a nation.

Critics warn that the state's progressive management has grown paradoxically sclerotic, overseeing a slow-motion public pensions crisis, neglecting infrastructure, and building a budgetary house of cards hostage to fluctuating income tax levels from the resident superrich.

But mores matter even more than money, and most Californians have been more than willing put up with the state’s problems so long as their way of life is protected and perfected. Resistance from a stubborn conservative remnant in the far north and central valley has never been able to halt the libidinous, drug-friendly, welfare-statist juggernaut that is the state’s dominant culture.

From climate law to immigration law (or the lack thereof), California’s elected Democrats see themselves rightly as the strongest center of opposition to American conservatives and to Trump alike, and the one with the deepest popular legitimacy.

California secessionists also understand that there are fewer practical hurdles, compared with other parts of the country, to parting ways with the USA. A smaller or more parochial corner of America would never contemplate secession, if only because the achievement of such willful idiosyncrasy would come at the cost of isolation and obscurity.

For California, however — approximately the fifth-largest economy in the world — independence wouldn’t necessarily bring economic hardship.

Perennial worries about entertainment and tech flight to states dangling incentives might spike in the early days of a new California Republic. But citizens won’t blink at the inevitable higher subsidies lawmakers and a Democratic governor will be quick to offer those anchor industries. And the other pillars of California’s economy — tourism and agriculture — can’t be relocated by skittish investors.

But, even among enthusiasts, there has not been much thought devoted to imagining what exactly a post-secession California would look like. In part, that may be because of a general reluctance to consider what the essence of a nation really is.

Secessionists don’t seem to realize that independence would be just the beginning of the messy political questions. Their laboratory of democracy would be confronted with several immediate experiments. Most American secession movements have been group efforts, from the Confederacy’s wave of departures to New England’s Hartford Convention flirtation with Yankeexit. Theoretically, in late 1860, South Carolinians were prepared to run an independent nation on their own, prompting unionist James Petigru to call the state “too small for a republic and too large for an insane asylum.” No one, however, had designs on fragmenting the “Palmetto Republic” into even smaller pieces.

But California is large enough to function as one or several different nations — or one nation made up of, say, six states, in accordance with venture capitalist Tim Draper’s so-called “Six Californias” ballot initiative. There’s Jefferson, the far-northern hotbed of rebellious rural folk who’d probably push Humboldt County’s hippies to seek a statelet of their own; Los Angeles-anchored West California, dependent only on northern water; the greater San Francisco Bay state of Silicon Valley; Central California, a Texas of the Pacific ringed by liberal neighbors; a swath of land with Sacramento at its center called North California; and South California, stretching from LA-adjacent Inland Empire to the desert hinterland and the Mexican border.

If Californians did manage to come together behind the difficult task of securing a peaceful and legitimate withdrawal from the union, they’d be forced to confront that abandoning federalism wouldn’t be nearly so easy.

Without doubt, California’s many minority Republicans — assuming they didn’t all flock to Texas — would push at once to formally institutionalize decentralized government. A quick look at November’s county-level electoral map underscores how strong resistance remains in the far north and Central Valley to Democratic policies. Even many conservatives and libertarians in counties that voted for Hillary Clinton, such as traditionally Republican Orange County, would find it hard to endure life under direct rule from Sacramento.

Indeed, California liberals, as soon as they’re unshackled from Washington, could conceivably take a sharp turn toward illiberal left progressivism, pushing for draconian limitations on guns, smoking, speech, and traditional private property rights. Yet doing so would aggravate regional factionalism and stoke reactionary politics on the right. (California gun sales have already gone through the roof.) It’s easy to envision the reasonable middle of politics clearing out as Golden Staters, not always immune to the appeal of cults and fantasies, rushed toward militant extremes.

With no blueprint to borrow from the United States for making states entirely from scratch, Californians would likely have to resort to the initiative process, where their judgment is notoriously questionable, to hammer out how many states, if any, the Second Bear Republic would include and where exactly their borders would be drawn.

In the alternative, of course, they could fight a civil war. It might be, for example, that state-level secessionists in the State of Jefferson — up in the same northerly region that tilted toward Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary and toward Trump in the general election — would prefer to hive off on their own, outside both California and the United States.

And some urban enclaves might wonder if the time had finally come to go full city-state. After all, can anyone really imagine President Xavier Becerra sending the Army of California to take back the Principality of Mountain View, street by bloody street?

Such internal enmity, however, is the stuff of foundings — even in the United States, which enjoyed an unprecedented opportunity to establish its own unique society and culture before taking the fateful step of political independence. The question is whether Californians would truly be up for it. Most Californians — especially the most independently minded — see martial vigor and armed vigilance as a hallmark only of the past.

The California National Party allows for the necessity of a "small professional military," but offers a civil corps out for objectors, and plans on sharing defense duties with the armed forces of the United States. Militarized borders with the United States and Mexico would, of course, be anathema for the California electorate. Activists, including some libertarians, would likely seize their chance to encourage the free flow of people and goods.

It’s easy to let your imagination run away with itself. But one thing does seem clear: California secession wouldn’t be a one-way ticket to the one-party progressive utopia some frustrated Democrats seem to dream it could be. On the other hand, in an ever-more-hopelessly polarized America, it could encourage a nationwide embrace of those two quintessentially West Coast ideals — wishful thinking and conscious uncoupling. California Über Alles indeed?

Read the original article on Foreign Policy. "Real World. Real Time." Follow Foreign Policy on Facebook. Subscribe to Foreign Policy here. Copyright 2017. Follow Foreign Policy on Twitter.

Original Quill wrote:

Los Angeles Times wrote:'Calexit' organizers can now start collecting signatures to get California secession on the ballot ...

Jules wrote:



Might the USA break up on the watch of the invincible, omnipotent Donald Trump??  Say it isn't so !