I do not think this has a factual answer so I am posting in IMHO.
Parts of northern California and southern Oregon are making noises about secession from each state and forming the 51st state called ‘Jefferson’. I hear there are parts of Colorado talking about this, as well as whole swaths of the southern US.
It seems mostly symbolic, but what are their chances for success, ultimately? Will their point be well taken, or just ignored as a fringe movement dependent on who is in the White House? Is this secession idea ever going to get any traction, anywhere, or we always have the 50 states?
[QUOTE=US Constitution, Article IV Section 3]
New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states 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.
[/QUOTE]
So unless the residents of Siskiyou county can both convince the rest of the states’ voters to approve their secession, and get Congress to approve creating a new state and adding two new Senators, probably not.
I recall a county in Vermont trying to secede and join New Hampshire a few years back - or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t go anywhere, but something like that would probably stand a greater chance of success than forming a new state.
And then there’s Cascadia, which has its own unorthodox militia.
Take a look a Wendover Utah. They want to join with West Wendover in Nevada. Moving the border a few miles. Both towns are for it. Both states are for it. The House of Reps passed a bill. But a small collection of Senators blocked it.
If they can’t get a small border change through, it would be virtually impossible to get a new state added that would change the representation in the Senate and House.
At this point, the union is pretty much closed. There is perhaps room for 2-3 new states carved out of existing territories such as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and Virgin Islands. 50 states however is a nice round number, and the US doesn’t want to be over extended. The borders are pretty much fixed as well, barring minor corrections due to changing topography.
There’ve been several movements over time (most recently in the 1970s) for the Upper Peninsula of Michigan (along with, possibly a couple of the adjacent counties of northern Wisconsin, and maybe the northern part of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula) to form the state of Superior.
I was a kid in Green Bay during the 1970s attempt…at that point, it was driven by the feeling, among citizens of the UP and northern Wisconsin, that their concerns were ignored by the “downstate” governments.
It would yield a very lightly-populated, and pretty poor, state, which I suspect may be one reason why it hasn’t come back up since.
the state of Jefferson was mooted back in the late thirties when the southwestern counties of Oregon and California’s northern coastal counties proposed a secession, which was to be announced on December 7, 1941. Something else happened that day in Hawaii that pushed Jefferson right out of the news. Even now the name “Jefferson” is commonly used in commercial names in towns like Yreka.
I’d love to see various Dem-leaning urban areas in GOP-dominated states start their own secession movements. Have Austin, Dallas-Fort Worth, Houston-Galveston, and San Antonio secede from Texas; have Atlanta secede from Georgia, Memphis from Tennessee, Kansas City and St. Louis from Missouri, Gary from Indiana, the Research Triangle area and Charlotte from North Carolina…
The best Dem response is to show that two can play at this game; that’s more likely to get the GOP-leaning secessionists to STFU than anything else would.
40 years there was talk in New York City about them becoming the 51st state. Left wing politicians such as Bella Abzug endorsed it saying Fun City was completely different from upstate. The movement melted as quickly as a snowball in 100 degree day when they realized they wouldn't get as much federal aid as a state.
I don’t think there’s been any significant change in an existing state’s border since 1863 when West Virginia separated from Virginia. That pretty much shows how high the barrier is - you need a civil war to do it.
There was some talk several years ago that parts of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas were threatening to break off and form a new state. The joke was that the new state would be called “KOTex”.
