You would need consent from the rest of the states in order to leave, and that isn't happening any time soon.
I think this is actually at the root of why America's administrative capacity has become so weak. Administrators are, for want of a better phrase, not content to stay in their lane, and try to smuggle other ideological baggage through their administration, which breeds resentment and resistance. Transportation planners are not content to build the roads people want, but want to make people take trains instead. Educators and public health experts think it's their job to weigh on race relations. The administrative class has always been haughty, since its inception in the Wilson era, but now they've found religion and become evangelical about it.
No particular state is more hell-bent on keeping Texas in the union than Texas.
All of the Texan talk of secession is just virtue signaling and pea-cocking, intended to drive the voter base to show up to the polls.
Most states that appear to lean in either direction at the governmental level have very substantial opposition voter populations. This is the biggest reason nobody is seriously going to consider secession, aside of rhetoric for the base.
I'm not sure what happens in the case of an abortion provider from a legal state visiting an illegal state. My suspicion is that they might try and be rebuked on jurisdictional grounds. It's an even weaker case than local citizen travel, since no part of the acts occurred inside the jurisdiction.
Impressive gymnastics.
I don't know what hair you're trying to split here, but the gymnastics are getting even more imporessive.
> Regulating one’s own citizens while they are traveling elsewhere is different than trying to regulate a different state.
Missouri's law, for example, would allow Missouri citizens to sue out-of-state physicians who perform an abortion on a Missourian but have never lived, set foot in, or done business in Missouri.
Looking forward to the incoming sequence of twists and flips.
This topic generates strong feelings for obvious and legitimate reasons. But that makes it more important (not less) to follow the site guidelines. That's why we added this one:
"Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I guess my county (Anne Arundel, MD) is technically "blue" at the moment--it went for Biden +14. But in 2018's "blue wave" it went for Larry Hogan +38. Maryland, despite being solidly Democrat, is pretty conservative in a distinctly mid-Atlantic way.
While we have disagreements, the American people are not particularly divided on the major issues.
Another factoid: Biden got 5,244,886 votes in New York and 5,259,126 votes in Texas. In other words, more people voted for Biden in Texas than in New York.
That changed recently when the state became the target of national politics. Suddenly, the folks on the other side of the aisle were not Georgia Democrats, but California and New York Democrats. That created a ton of polarization that didn’t exist before.
Right now, our national politics pits California and New York Democrats against Mississippi Republicans, and the rest of us just have to pick a side. Things would be far less polarized if we split up, and it was California Democrats versus California Republicans and Texas Democrats versus Texas Republicans.
Here in Maryland, we have an extremely popular Republican governor that does Republican stuff like oppose public transit and try to keep taxes low. State politics is quite civil, because Baltimore isn’t San Francisco (despite voting similarly for Biden) but neither is Carroll County Mississippi (despite voting similarly for Trump).
Also, if you're using New York and California Democrats as a proxy for left-wing voters, Biden is pretty disappointing on that front. A huge part of why Biden was the nominee was specifically so he could appeal to centrist voters. The fact that Texan and Georgian voters voted for someone who was picked partly to appeal to those same people should not be surprising.
No, I’m making a completely different argument. The point is that Georgia Democrats are closer to Georgia Republicans than California Democrats are to Georgia Republicans. When politics is locally focused, there is less acrimony because the sides are less far apart.
But when Georgia politics came under the national spotlight, it became a proxy for the fight between New York and California Democrats and Mississippi Republicans. “Democrat” in Georgia used to mean Zell Miller, but now refers to Nancy Pelosi. That greatly increased the acrimony of politics in the state.
Your point about Biden actually supports my point. Before southern Democrats rescued his campaign, the Act Blue donors and activists were running a carnival where candidates were all raising their hand to open borders. Trump didn’t run against Biden, he ran against those people. That’s only possible because New York and California Democrats have so much power over the party apparatus and messaging that it’s easy to make them the face of the party.
If the states were split up, that wouldn’t happen. My county exec is a Democrat, but it’s hard for me to get worked up about him because he’s a farmer. If folks in New York and California had no input into the laws that applied to me, or how my schools are run, etc., I don’t think I would follow politics at all.
I'm struggling to understand how we go from that, to saying that there is even the remotest support in Georgia to secede even though every national candidate Georgians elected is in the party currently in power, or that after secession the elections would or should go back to Republican vs. Republican-lite. The only way any of that makes sense is if the actual goal is to separate the Georgia Democrats from the national apparatus to hopefully give state Republicans a chance to figuratively beat the newly-activated voters into submission. In fact if we're going strictly by the numbers then in any split Georgia should stay with the Democratic parts of the country.
Also I'm not sure what Pelosi has to do with any of this but at the moment, from the outside, the face of Georgia Democrats look like Ossoff, Warnock and Abrams all of whom are authentically local. I'm sure Trump and the Republican party would like people to think that Pelosi is the face of the Georgia Democrats, though.
I do feel bad for Georgian voters, not to mention the people counting the votes. It wasn't their fault that the balance of power came down to them in the end and I'm sure most of them didn't like being in the middle of that firestorm. However I suspect any acrimony was primarily due to the fact that the Democrats found a winning strategy in a formerly safe state.
They aren't. It's not 1860, no one is campaigning on preserving the Union over other policy considerations. While there would be intense disputes about how to treat people who didn't want to be separated from the US, and about disposition of federal property in the event of a divorce, few in NY or CA outside of the Republican minority in each state would expend even the slightest effort on keeping Texas in the Union as such, though they might oppose bad divorce terms on those other issues.
On the other hand, all the other Republican-led states would oppose the idea fiercely, because it would be a giant shift away from the Republican Party in the national balance of political power. (And, yes, Texas is far from solid red by population, but that's not what matters.)
Then why do they care so much about abortion laws in Texas, or whether Texas expands Medicaid, etc? Really, why do they care about the federal government at all?
Historically, Democrats cared about the federal government because Republicans states like California had the money and they needed the federal government to redistribute it. But today, Democrat states have the money. So what’s the point? Why not just adopt universal healthcare in California without regard to what Texas does?
Because Texas is in the Union, and what is Constitutionally allowed in Texas is what is Constitutionally allowed in their state, and they don't assume that they will have a permanent legislative majority there, because, well, history shows that they likely won't.
Other than that Californians care about rights in Texas the same.way they care about rights in Saudi Arabia.
I think it’s more like the Crusades. Californians believe in the universalism of their moral world view and want to impose it on the heathens in Texas. More like George Bush trying to bring democracy to the Middle East.
I don’t think the hard part is getting people on board with it. The hard part is just getting a vote on it.
EDIT to address your point: I think if enough people want it, it will happen. The Civil War was about slavery, no matter what some folks will say. The current direction isn’t towards war, it’s towards an indifference followed by dissolution. There’s no energy to keep Florida or Texas or California from leaving if that’s what a large majority want.
If they raised this sort of thing to a vote, I would strongly hope that we let them build their own Republican utopia.
They'll never raise this to a vote, though, because the last thing they want is for that wish to be granted. Complaining about the federal government when you've mismanaged your state is easy, actually having to manage it without relying on handouts is not.
Ukraine gave Russia the nukes it held within its border. Looking back probably not a great idea.
We're talking about a military coup in the United States, which is a big topic, but technically, very few tanks and bombs or jets or nukes are in states. In part, for this reason. They're on federal property. States have militias; the U.S. has aircraft carriers and cruise missiles. If a secessionist government tried to invade federal territory, I would be wholly in favor of a decisive (if compassionate) military response.
The bigger challenge, as it always is, is the people.
Anyone can declare anything. What matters is who the troops and missile launchers listen to. That’s the Pentagon.
Would soldiers who live in these states obey DC's order to kill their neighbors and friends?
They certainly might, depending on the circumstances. But it is unclear to me that the outcome would be simple.
This is a popular factoid, but it often leaves out the fact that Russia had the codes to use the nukes, the ability to maintain them, and that other countries (like the US) wanted the nukes out of Ukraine.
If they had kept them, it is far from clear that they would be a nuclear power today.
As someone who lives in California, I thought you were talking about us. I wish I could move to Florida. Seems like a better place to live in almost all regards.
Unless of course, Florida's hurricanes, mosquitos, sinking land, horrible people, and lackluster economy are keeping you from moving there?
OTOH, Florida begs for federal handouts every time there's a big storm because somehow they never get around to requiring developers to build flood-resistant structures.
When someone calls an entire population of a state, nation, or region as "horrible people"; we call them bigots. It is time for introspection and reflection when you get to a point where everyone you don't agree with are horrible people. And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
Usually this would be flagged, but it goes with the party lines I suppose so it is allowed.
And it is not even true, most cities in Florida are democrats, but IMO that shouldn't matter.
That is objectively false. Only the Miami-Dade metropolitan area in Florida leans blue.
The funniest thing of all is talking about generalizing all people when talking about a state that passed laws to demonize all lgbtqia people.
Eastern Washington and Oregon have been talking about seceding from their respective states for /years/ and absolutely nothing has come of it because—surprise—most people don’t want to leave.
The number of people who are intensely political (who dislike Florida because politics or who are “Let’s go, Brandon!”) are a very small part of the population. They’re just very loud.
That's like saying you need permission to break the law.
Deep down, we all know that if you want to do a thing, you can just do it, and leave those who value systems and processes and order to grapple with it. Trump proved that.
Edit: to be clear, I do not support or like this reality. But if you don't think that the right will do anything other than "lol u mad libs? deal with it" then you haven't been paying attention.