Free Republic

In 2018, the issue of whether California should secede from the union could come to a head. Yes California Independence Campaign, a fringe political group that calls for the state to become an independent nation, filed a proposed ballot measure with the Attorney General's Office on November 21, The Sacramento Bee reports. If it garners the half a million signatures required to appear on the 2018 gubernatorial ballot, the measure would strike language from the state constitution that would help clear a path to secession. Still, a state holds no right to secede under federal law. Californians would need to...

Pro-independence Texans weren’t the only ones energized by the vote by Brexit vote. The California secession movement has been riding a wave of interest since Thursday’s vote by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. The campaign has already gained a Brexit-inspired nickname: Calexit “We have a lot of people sending us messages and a lot of people want to find our online digital version of our independence referendum,” said Louis Marinelli, who heads the Yes California Independence Campaign. “We have a lot of people who have joined our Facebook page, a lot of people who are talking about...

Apparently Trump's recent letter to the Energy Department, which included very pointed questions about climate change research, and/or his appointment of former Texas Governor Rick Perry to lead that department going forward (a department that Perry proposed shutting down back in 2012 for those who may have forgotten), "triggered" California's head snowflake, Governor Jerry Brown, into an epic climate change rant before a gathering of scientists at the American Geophysical Union's national conference in San Francisco. Vowing to defy Trump's efforts to undermine the "progress" made by California on climate change regulations, Brown promised that his state is "ready to...

Louis J. Marinelli is a man on a quixotic mission: to help California secede from the United States and become an independent country. Surprisingly, this quest has been going relatively well of late. Marinelli's group, Yes California, is attempting to collect 585,000 signatures necessary to place a secessionist question on the 2018 ballot. Buoyed by California's already tense relationship with President Donald Trump, the campaign has received a large amount of press coverage and support over the past few months. But for the 30-year-old Yes California president, there remains one annoying problem: People keep asking him why he lives in...