You can't change the California state borders without getting the affected states' legislatures to also ratify the change, as well as Congress. Simply splitting California up would also require action by their legislature in addition to approval by Congress.
Its not really a plan to split California into six states, its a plan to propose to the federal government splitting California into six states, and to amend the State Constitution to permit each county a broad power to nullify state law within the county until and unless that partition occurs [1]. This is particularly critical to note because if the federal government were to reject the partition plan (which seems quite possible if it were to pass California voters), the changes to the State Constitution would remain.
[1] See Section 4 of the initiative [2], amending Article XI of the State Constitution.
I agree with you, however that's unfortunately not possible. The California Constitution defines the redistricting process in terms of the California Citizens Redistricting Commission. We would need a ballot initiative to overturn it. I'm not aware of any initiatives to add such a provision to the ballot in 2020.
Rent control in San Francisco was a local ordinance in San Francisco.
There are many, many factors involved in dividing up an existing government into 6 new governments. Existing laws (namely Prop 13), significantly more abridged state Constitutions, existing contractual liability obligations (CALPERS & CALSTERS retirement plans), and other contracts would likely be renegotiated in light of a different set of laws.
The only thing I particularly liked about this is that California's population base is currently an outlier and our US Senate representation is vastly underpowered in proportion to other states. I don't think the founding fathers knew that one state would have 69x the population of another state without the people voting to change either the state composition or the method of calculation of senators.
This is even harder than it sounds, for reasons good and bad.
If anyone is still bothering to follow the Constitution, the funds have to be distributed across the states, so you can't just give California only some funds.
It is also politically infeasible to give just California funds, most especially because a whole bunch of states don't want to pay for the other states.
Even if it gets passed that, this is the kind of spending that is virtually guaranteed to increase consumer price inflation, which is a far worse problem than state budget shortfalls.
Why not? The subdivisions of California are creatures of state law, either statutory or constitutional. An initiative can modify statues or the constitution. There are three limitations on them (Art. II, section 8, (d), (e), and (f)) but I don't see how any of them would apply here.
Do you see a federal constitutional or statutory doctrine that would prevent it from doing so?
California has seriously discussed doing exactly that. But given the situation in DC, it is likely that they would be actively sabotaged by the federal government if they tried. So much for "states rights"....
There is nothing preventing it, they've all just decided California rules meet their same goals, and it is more advantageous for them to share the same rules than expand further.
Implementing that in California is a small challenge compared to implementing it for the US. The latter would take years and 2/3 of the states must agree, as it would mean a change to the Constitution.
Oregon and Washington have already passed bills to change, but the bills require California to also pass one, and they have not. Oregon signed their bill in 2019.
You might as well call it impossible, as long as the CA legislature has more than 12.5% Republicans -- which is basically going to be forever. Requiring a referendum would be better.
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