Update: State of Jefferson

Posted by Tina

I ran across a long article today addressing the movement, history and future of the State of Jefferson. A map showing the current status of each county is included for those interested. Unfortunately, concrete support from the majority of counties is not currently happening. I was intrigued by statements made by Mark Baird, the primary spokesman in the movement:

An Article IV, Section 3 split is, almost everyone concedes, an extremely unlikely proposition. As of late January, the group has not found a legislator willing to introduce a bill to even get the process started.

“If the California Legislature ignores us, and it’s likely they will — there’s no monetary incentive for them not to do that — then we will pursue a judicial remedy,” Baird says. That remedy would be to sue California for lack of representation and dilution of vote. If the suit were successful, it could go to the Supreme Court.

Any such case would rely on a challenge to the Supreme Court’s 1964 decision in Reynolds v. Sims, a landmark in that era’s voting-rights struggle. In Reynolds, the plaintiffs argued that urban districts of Alabama (home to a significant percentage of the state’s black citizens) were harmfully underrepresented in the state’s legislature. The court ruled 8-1, on the “one man, one vote” principle, that state legislatures had to be apportioned on the basis of population, not geography. The way Chief Justice Warren put it in his famous decision was, “Legislators represent people, not trees or acres.”

That meant that in a state like California, the system for apportioning legislators — in which each county had one state senator, regardless of population — had to change. In 1964, L.A. County had 6 million residents and just one senator, the same representation as Lake County, with 14,000 residents. Today, thanks to Reynolds, L.A. County, with 9.8 million people, has eight state senators whose districts are completely within its borders, while 11 counties in the northern part of the state share just 1.

That, Baird says, means that the residents of rural northern California, where trees and acres are much more plentiful than people, don’t stand a chance of getting anyone to listen to them.

Kevin Hendricks, who formed the political action committee, “Keep It California” comments: “It just defies logic to think you can take all the poorest counties in California, cluster them together and somehow end up with a prosperous new state.” Hendricks thinks the Northstate can work with the legislature by befriending a few members and pursuading them to call attention to the problems.

Baird pokes back:

Baird insists he isn’t worried about money, either. He’s confident, he says, that “responsible resource management” and smaller government would result in a fiscally solid state.

Baird says he would feel no nostalgia about saying goodbye to citizenship in California — which he sees not as a sun-bathed dream state uniting a diverse citizenry but, rather, a debt-ridden, dysfunctional, failed example of bloated government.

Would Jefferson be poor? Maybe so, but he already knows what that feels like. “You can’t get much poorer than we are here in Yreka,” Baird says. “I’d rather be free and broke. Here’s the deal for us: Our worst economic day will be the last day we call ourselves Californians.”

So the movement’s founders continue to press for a new state. Part of the challenge, as I see it, is that the various counties contain liberals and moderates who aren’t affected by a lack of representation or who benefit from the states redistribution policies. Still, if you are interested in the issue this is the article for you.

(Please note: The cowboy/mining seal above is different from the others we usually see, I don’t know it’s origin but I do prefer it.)