CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, JULY 2, 2021, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“THIS MIGHT BE THE GOOFIEST STATE-SPLIT
IDEA YET”
It’s no secret that plenty of folks in California’s rural
northern counties would love to leave the Golden State and form one of their
own – the most persistent such plan has been called the State of Jefferson
since the notion first appeared in the 1940s.
Rural residents in counties from Lassen to Lake have long
felt dominated in setting policies affecting their rivers, timber and other
essentials by the urban masses of the San Francisco Bay area and Southern
California.
This feeling took off in earnest in the 1960s, after the U.S.
Supreme Court’s One Person, One Vote decision deprived northern counties of the
kind of strong representation they previously enjoyed, where square miles often
counted as much as population. No longer could those counties shape the entire
California freeway system, as the late state Sen. Randolph Collier did during the
more than 20 years he represented several North Coast counties, for just one
example.
Then most of Southern California gradually became as
politically liberal as the Bay area, and rural counties felt even more forlorn.
They’ve devised scheme after scheme to split away into their own state. The
problem has always been that they’d need a “yes” vote from the full state – not
just their part – in order to do this, and that’s not in the cards.
So there’s never been a statewide vote on this issue, which
nevertheless doesn’t stop ideas from percolating.
The newest has trickled south from rural eastern Oregon,
whose denizens now have begun to feel similarly toward the
Portland/Salem/Eugene areas of the Willamette River Valley as some Northern
Californians do about California’s coastal counties from Marin south. They’d
like to become part of consistently conservative Idaho, five Oregon counties
said in votes last fall.
Oregonians pushing for new boundaries want to free themselves
from the parts of their current state most infested by emigrating former
Californians and their liberal ideas.
They’d like to take with them California counties that have
flirted with the State of Jefferson idea.
If realized, their plan would create a Greater Idaho taking
in some of the most scenic, most mountainous, timber- and river-rich parts of
the American West.
This plan has several big differences from the state of
Jefferson, which upsets Democrats because if it happened, it would likely give
Republicans two new seats in the U.S. Senate, making Democratic control there
and in the Electoral College significantly less achievable.
Instead, the new Greater Idaho would still have only two
senators, the Senate itself would hold at 100 members and the Electoral College
wouldn’t change much. And getting the rural counties of both Oregon and
California away from political control by urban Democrats might give those
rural places far more power to determine their own policies on water, renewable
energy, smog control and many other issues where their voters consistently
disagree with current state governments.
But analysis reveals this plan as even goofier than the State
of Jefferson, which has yet to prove it could be economically viable if it
should ever come to exist. Also, for the rural counties of both Oregon and
California to join Idaho, they would need yes votes from the full electorates
in all three states involved – not a very likely prospect.
Urban Oregonians are no more likely to approve the departure
of the tourist tax dollars produced along the Columbia River and in the Cascade
Mountains than coastal Californians are to part willingly from the ski resorts,
national parks, forests and other tourist enterprises of the northern Sierra
Nevada and the North Coast.
But the State of Jefferson state of mind is not going away.
“Rural people and rural counties no longer have a voice,” Mark Baird, one of
the new plan’s advocates, told a reporter. “If this (new idea) turns out to be
the shortest route to liberty and representation, I’ll give it a go.”
Yet, the greater Idaho plan is even less likely to succeed
than the State of Jefferson ever has been. Which nevertheless won’t prevent
anyone from longing for the “good old days” when rural counties were the
sparsely populated little tails that wagged the big urban dogs.
-30-
Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough:
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net.
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