Fed up with liberal overreaching, rural counties are talking about seceding from their states — but there’s no chance of success:
The U.S. Constitution allows a new state to be formed out of an existing one only if approved by both the original state’s legislature and Congress, which almost never happens. The most recent states to form this way were Maine, which separated from Massachusetts in 1820, and West Virginia, which broke off from Virginia in 1863, when Virginia belonged to the Confederacy.
Claire Suddath, the Bloomberg writer, doesn’t seem to understand political “science”:
The interesting thing about these new movements isn’t their likelihood of success, but the fact that they constitute blatant attempts at ideological gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering isn’t about Democrats wanting to be with Democrats and Republicans wanting to be with Republicans; it’s about redistricting so that your party has a slight majority in as many districts as possible, since each district goes to whoever wins the winner-takes-all majority vote.
“If people want to live in ideologically homogenous communities, they’re better off if you let that happen,” says Jason Sorens, a lecturer of government at Dartmouth College and the founder of the Free State Project, which is working to get 20,000 Libertarians to move to New Hampshire to swing the state’s political makeup. But if we divide our states into smaller and smaller units, won’t we eventually have communities too diminutive to take care of themselves? After all, a city block doesn’t have the resources to care for its citizens the way an entire city can, and a handful of rural counties is rarely able to make up a whole state, unless it’s Wyoming. “Yes, but you don’t want people to live in a political environment they don’t believe in,” Sorens says. “The best we can do is give the most people the kind of government they want.” There’s a name for that idea: democracy.
Won’t we eventually have communities too diminutive to take care of themselves? Um, no? Why do we have states at all then? Why do we have counties within states? Why don’t we let the biggest, best government, the federal government, handle all our problems?
I suppose that doesn’t come across as reductio ad absurdum to some people. Anyway, if you call it democracy, it can’t be wrong.
It’s idiots like Claire Suddath that are making secession look like a pretty good idea to a lot of people. Ironically, these are the same people who think that any allegedly oppressed minority group that can make a flag should have their own country, courtesy of NATO “Humanitarian” air strikes…