“California Supreme Court Squashes Bid To Split State Into Three” (NPR):
California will be staying in one piece, at least for now, after the state’s supreme court ruled that a proposal to divide California into three cannot be placed on the ballot in November.
… the Planning and Conservation League (PCL), a nonprofit environmental group in California, filed a lawsuit to block the measure from getting to a vote.
The PCL says the proposal amounts to a change in the state constitution, which must be decided by the Legislature before it goes to voters, The Sacramento Bee reports.
“We opposed the measure because splitting the state up doesn’t solve any of our existing challenges, it just makes them worse,” Howard Penn, the executive director of PCL, told NPR via email. “We have worked hard for the past 50 plus years on statewide policies that help make California a healthy place to live. If the state gets split up into three parts, it would be like hitting the reset button and starting over.”
I’m not sure why the judges wouldn’t let this on the ballot. The other 49 states would have had to approve the measure, right? And that would never have happened? So why does anyone care?
What about an internal split, though, that would be less dramatic in name but have more impact in reality?
Right now someone in San Diego who thinks that schools should be funded more lavishly or run differently has to travel up to Sacremento and argue with imperial overlords. With a population of 40 million, far larger than most European countries, there is no reason for anyone in the capital to listen to a citizen unless that citizen is crazy rich or famous.
A Pattern Language (written by a UC Berkeley professor and friends!) suggests a country sized like Denmark, about 5 million, if individuals are to have any practical chance of influencing laws and decisions. The claim is that people will be happier in a country where they have a political voice.
Why couldn’t Californians vote to take apart their unaccountable state-wide bureaucracy one piece at a time? For example, they could vote to disband the California Department of Education (“We oversee the state’s diverse public school system, which is responsible for the education of more than six million children and young adults in more than 10,000 schools with 295,000 teachers. We are in charge of enforcing education law and regulations and continuing to reform and improve public school programs.”). Adjusted for demographics, California runs the worst-performing schools in the United States (nytimes). With nothing to lose, therefore, just say that whatever the statewide department was doing would now be done by counties (smaller ones could band together and cooperate if necessary) and that funding would be similarly devolved onto the counties (they would still have the Federal education bureaucrats to report to, of course, just like now!).
If decentralizing control of schools worked out well, voters could move on to the next government function. San Francisco could continue to run a winner-take-all family court system (the current law; see also how it could have worked for Ellen Pao) while San Diego adopted shared parenting and capped child support profits (see this chapter of Real World Divorce for the three basic types of custody dispute resolution systems in the U.S.) There could be marijuana in supermarkets up in Eureka and restrictions on the sale of this critically important medication down in San Diego. The speed limit on highways could be set by county. Maybe out in the desert it be over the current statewide 70 mph limit. Back in Silicon Valley the limit could be set to 25 mph to reflect (a) the reality of actual travel speeds during most of the day, and (b) the experimental nature of the self-driving cars that are sharing the road. (That’s another good thing to regulate locally: self-driving cars! They make a lot more sense in some places than others and how does a bureaucrat in Sacramento know?)
Eventually the only things left at the state level would be the National Guard and the soon-to-be-$1 trillion high-speed rail project. There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, I think, that requires individual states to have central bureaucracies and uniform statewide laws for any given government function.
California readers: Would this make you and your neighbors happier? You’d still be in the same state as people who live 500 miles away, but you wouldn’t have to get their approval anymore.
Philg: “With a population of 40 million, far larger than most European countries, there is no reason for anyone in the capital to listen to a citizen unless that citizen is crazy rich or famous.”
While this article, like many of your other ones, presents an excellent idea, per your comment quoted above, need to convince your crazy rich or famous Californian friends to talk to the people in their capital …
People probably are happier when they have more control over their lives & one of the basic ideas of the US was to devolve power locally so states and municipalities could become laboratories of social experiment — though a lot of this has fallen by the wayside because of Supreme Court doctrine over the last fifty years or so. But what is also interesting is that some guy from an environmental group seems to have blocked this from a vote — presumably because he expected to get less of what he wanted if the state were split. California like New York is a state where a large group of people concentrated in a relatively small place get to control a much larger geography. Presumably that is his concern — that large swaths of the state would adopt different environmental policies than the people living in SF and LA, who probably have a lot of influence in Sacramento.
In 2024, Calif* jumps to over 200 electoral votes, so no-one wants to risk 100 going to republicans.
> I’m not sure why the judges wouldn’t let this on the ballot
Because if California splits up, they would all lose their jobs?
Very nice. I haven’t heard anyone else propose such a thing and I like it. It has a much more plausible future (which sadly is still none) than the proposal to split the state into three which no other states would ever allow for (until perhaps the electoral college is done away with and the Senate reduced in power).
I tend to think most of our government/societal ills and the lack of representation of the people and the inordinate power of lobbyists, and the costs of elections are because the scale of representative or senator to people is far too large.
Judges are supposed to decide cases based on the literal reading of the law and the constitution. Judges are not supposed to decide cases based on their personal value system, what consequences the case may have, or what they will like the constitution to say.
Dwight:
That presumes that Californian judges can read. But what would stop those who can’t from asking a distinguished citizen to read the relevant piece out loud for them? Someone like, say, Rep. Maxine Waters. I mean, no pressure.
I think the fear is that the Silicon Valley cash cows might no longer support the Los Angeles problems.
The referendum would never pass and get federal approval, but then BREXIT was not supposed to be approved either. The judges don’t want to take a chance.
There is nothing in the U.S. Constitution, I think, that requires … uniform statewide laws for any given government function.
It depends what functions. There are certainly certain things that you could do that would violate the Bill of Rights and/or the 14th Amendment regarding equal protection, due process, etc.. And the state constitution might have even more to say about these things.
OTOH, local control of many things – police, schools, property taxes, etc. has been the norm from day 1 of our republic and remain legal (to some extent). Also, the legislature can make rational distinctions – for example in NY State there are statewide rent control laws but they are only effective in cities that have a population greater than 1 million. It just so happens that there is only 1 city in NY that has a population of over 1 million. Many states have different “classes” of municipality based on size – class A and B townships, cities, villages, boroughs, etc. with somewhat different rules for the governing structure of each. And so on.
Could a state, without changing its Federal representation, divide itself into 3 pieces (North Cal. Central Cal. Southern Cal) with separate legislatures and laws for each (as well as a statewide legislature), just as in the UK you have a national parliament as well as a Scottish parliament?
I wouldn’t like it. In my experience, most tyranny is local.
None of the last nine U.S. Presidents have had more direct negative impact on my life than Sacramento and my local government. Officials from my city micromanage every aspect of what I am allowed to do to my house. State police (CHP) lie in wait on every highway.
Meanwhile I have never had a single interaction with HUD or the FBI.
Local government requires the most restraints. If it weren’t for state law, my city would now exercise the authority to decide for itself what I may charge for rent (CA does not allow rent control for single-family homes). Could you imagine Congress even proposing such a thing?
The feds don’t care what I charge in rent, so long as they get their share in income taxes.
Speaking of taxes, the California FTB is much harder to deal with than the IRS, and the County Assessor is a nightmare.
Where, anywhere (other than some bogus sanctuary-city or grey-area cannabis stuff) in the U.S. is there a concerted drive toward devolution towards local autonomy? Nowhere! Every solution to every problem must be at least statewide, if not national or even trans-national. If you don’t support national single-payer health care you hate everyone who is not rich. If you don’t support an activist Department of Education, you are an anti-intellectual troll. Virtually no one is talking about distributing power or authority. These break up California/Texas schemes have no chance of succeeding (and are really gerrymandering writ large)