It’s too damn big:
Because the state is so enormous and occupies some much of the attractive real estate on the West Coast, people have often been reluctant to leave even when its policies are badly flawed. Over the last decade, things got so bad that California finally did start losing large numbers of migrants to other states. But not before the state’s government dug a much deeper hole for itself than would have been likely had California been three or four smaller states, each forced to compete for migrants with the others.
That is the dilemma. It’s geographically such a desirable location that people are willing to put up with awful government.
The idea to break California into six seperate states does have merit. As a Californian I would support such an effort. It would lessen California’s influence in federal elections which I view as a good thing — and give the natural diversity of opinion across the state a more equal footing against the dominate monied interests of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
I saw a link yesterday to the guy who came up with a remapping of the US into 50 new states of equal population. I didn’t look closely but I’ll bet that it has the effect of concentrating votes such that the Democrats/statists would always win elections. I noted, particularly, the comment that it ended the “overrepresentation of small states.” Makes you wonder if he would be OK with eliminating the Senate, for the same reason.
Yes, these people don’t even understand what the purpose of the Senate is. They think it’s just another house. They’ve probably never even read Federalists 62 and 63.
Well, with the 17th Amendment, it more or less is another House.
But I guess I didn’t make my point clearly enough: I suspect that map was a thinly-veiled attempt to gerrymander a permanent Democratic majority. I’ll admit I don’t know how to test that theory. Or, rather, I have an idea, but not how to go about (or wanting to take the time to) confirming it. I would imagine it would involve just looking at the county-by-county data and seeing how the last few elections would have shaken out.
Not really. It still has different rules, and its composition isn’t proportional to the population its members represent. Which irks leftists, who hate the notion of the states as stakeholders in the Republic to no end.
It is an interesting idea and versions have been around for many years. As drawn, this version has a fatal flaw. It appears to ignore existing water rights.