- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/24857135
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Okay now I would like Dallas County to secede from Texas because Texas has an awful state government. Our top prosecutor is literally a criminal.
Texas actually has the right to divide itself into five states. If it had done so earlier, Gore and Hillary would have won the electoral college because at least one of those states would be blue.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/more-150-years-texas-has-had-power-secede-itself-180962354/
There’s a germ of a good idea in there, but they’ve got it backwards: Big cities like Chicago need to “secede” from their states, like the free imperial cities of the Holy Roman Empire. “Secede” here being a colloquial metaphor; the real, legalistic action would be declaring Dillon’s Rule void, and taking state-like sovereignty for themselves.
It makes sense on many levels: Cities are where lots of people live close together, and their infrastructure, services, public health, and governance needs therefore are very different than rural areas. They are the economic powerhouses of the world, and we need to let the city leaders nurture that power by responding to their local needs. The political polarization divides largely on urban/rural boundaries, and our antiquated political system dilutes city-dwellers’ votes and influence.
Lastly, our political system is broken, and can’t be fixed entirely within the system. But tearing down the system will definitely lead to chaos. (See: actual secession in 1861.) As I see it, this would be a radical move by the cities, but it would solve a lot of issues in the political system without tearing it down. It’s unlikely they’d get representation in Congress the way that free imperial cities had representation at the imperial diet, but even just getting out from under the thumb of state legislatures would be a huge step.
Maybe Illinois should give them what they want and stop any and all state or federal funding of the region until they beg to be let back in. I’m feeling a little vindictive today.
Keep taxing them, too, since they haven’t paid for the land.
Federal funding wouldn’t stop. But shared state tax revenue from Chicago would
The federal funding is provided to the state of Illinois, so the counties need the state treasury to provide federal funding to them.
If they were granted secession by the federal Congress they would be a state and get federal funding. That’s the only way they’d leave.
Yes but that circumstance could happen regardless of actions taken by the state of Illinois so it doesn’t have any impact on the plans I laid out.
They try this bullshit every few years despite being propped up by taxes from the populated northeastern corner of the state.
Ways repubs are trying to keep control of the senate…
They’re mad because Chicago having a higher population controls the vote and makes the state vote blue. But electoral college votes are by population so even if they were two states Chicago would still cancel them out anyway yeah?
There’s a minimum of 3 electoral votes per state even if they are under the population required for it. They will end up stealing those votes from other, more populous, states.
The electoral college is so fucked up. It needs to be abolished, but with the way things are going I can’t see that ever happening, anymore.
In the South Illinois hypothetical the bigger issue is the extra Senate seats more then the 3 electoral votes.
Really we need to abolish the current upper limit on the house and set it to a population marker again. If we did, the 100 electoral votes the Senate counts for would be an afterthought, because populous states like Cali (presuming something like 1 rep per 100k population.) would have hundreds of reps each.
I think we should allow this. And cites should do the same thing: whenever conservatives do this, cities should undergo mitosis, thereby not only canceling the red tactic, but increasing the liberal count. In fact, we should let this process run until there are 335 million states, and each person is their own elector, senator, and representative. That’d usher in the popular vote, and give each national the incomes and health care of both a senator and a representative, which would be Basic Income on steroids. Plus, the PACs would be busy trying to bribe every American citizen!
It’s a gloriously stupid idea.
The lowest population state should be the benchmark for what population gets 1 rep.
There’s precedent for it, with West Virginia. The problem is that the way that the Senate works makes what could have been a local issue extremely national.
Just make them like Puerto Rico where they are neither a state nor a sovereign nation.
That precedent comes with a big civil war shaped asterik.
Weird way to break the 51st state into existence, but ok.
51th*
Part of me thinks that we’ll never have a 51st state for the same reason that the volume always ends in a 5 or 0.
