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Try this on for real change. When California was admitted to the Union Congress also approved the state being split in two, if the citizens of California approved it. That takes care of one of the requirements under the US Constitution for forming a new state from an existing state. Congress has already approved the split.

The US Constitution also requires approval of the state legislature. Our California State Constitution grants citizens legislative powers by way of the Constitutional Amendment process, better known as the initiative.

I've been involved with some preliminary discussions about splitting the state in a manner never proposed before. Eight counties, Alameda, Contra Costa, Los Angeles, Marin, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and Santa Cruz would form one state. The remaining 50 counties would form the other state. Both states would retain the current state constitution with two years to have voters vote to retain it, or hold a constitutional convention to present the voters a new state constitution.

The larger of the two states would be the most conservative on the west coast, fill two new vacancies in the US Senate, and elect a conservative state government.

Ironically, faced with the social spending in the smaller of the two states, the small state would also make a dramatic shift to more conservative policies once it can no longer bleed money and resources from the rural, more conservative counties.

The vast bulk of natural resources like water, oil, forests plus power generating plants would be controlled by the larger, conservative state.

Any interest here? Help is needed. I'd like to get more people to stop trying to work within the state we have now, and start working toward a new free state. With the conservative voters of Orange, San Diego, Riverside, and San Bernardino counties coupled with the voters in the rural and inland counties, passage of an initiative splitting the state is assured.

The first step would to examine the revenue streams to see if such a thing is truely viable. A tremendous amount of money comes from the more populated counties, a lot of that money goes to pay for the water systems, the electric systems, the telephone systems of the more rural areas.

Especial care needs to be taken to examine infrastructure costs as well, especially for the roads. I don't think it is quite what most people imagine - either they are being bled dry by the more populated counties (likely considering the massive costs of schools in this state) or they are actually sucking huge resources off the more populated areas, likely through utility and gas taxes.

Only a real examination of the books in California would give a good idea on this and once that is examined, I think the idea is quite plausible. It sort of stinks - I don't want to move any further east than I'm already at, but if I want to be in the Right California, I'd have to go another four miles.

Huh. Drat, means we wouldn't get JPL, AMES or Caltech.

I'm unaware of the two state provision when California was admitted to the union. Do you have any information on this? It seems to contradict the Constitution, Article IV:

Section. 3.
Clause 1: New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new State shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or Parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress.

So LA county would be like China and all the Northern counties would represent Taiwan.

I could live with that, as long as we could get "Taiwan" to declare Independence from "China" and then become part of Northern California.

No way am I in favor of giving the coastline of Santa Cruz and Marin counties to the commies!

But on the plus side, we could go back to drilling for oil off of Santa Barbara county.

I'll throw my hat in the ring for this idea.

I've though for years that the old North/South split was wrongheaded because it would leave each new state diseased with the same cancer that precipitaetd the move to split in the first place.

No, an East/West split -- excising the cancerous counties from the rest of the state and forcing them to inherit their consequences -- makes the most sense of all.