You can have Alberta. And Stephen Harper would make a perfect Tea Party candidate for president.
Can you imagine a flag with three rows of 17?
But I see no prospect for another state. Alaska and Hawaii were discussed for years before statehood came. There is nothing like that today.
Now, let me warn all of you, if you make Puerto Rico a steak, the next thing they’ll want is a baked potato!
With sour cream!
And chives! And little tiny bacon bits and pieces of toast!
And then they’ll probably want a salad bar. Why, they’ll be lined up for miles!
This was going through my head the whole time I was reading this thread. 
I have been in North Dakota. My parents used to go south there for a winter holiday.
Oh, great. Then how the hell could I drive around Alberta on my next trip to B.C.?
Just what I was going to write after voting the same. It can’t happen in the current hyper-partisan atmosphere, where the tiniest hint of advantage to one party will cause the other to oppose it gangbusters.
But in 20 or 30 years, who knows? Maybe by then we’ll be back to where the big complaint is that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between the parties. Then the addition of two new senators becomes possible. That future is not foreseeable, but it’s possible.
First the Affordable Care Act has to get cemented in place, like Social Security. Plus the GOP has to lose big and consistently for at least four years, forcing that party to move left. Demographic trends make it plausible.
There was a movement, a small one, to make the Philippines a state.
Actually though what I see happening is a metro area that spans more than one state, say New York City, getting its own statehood status.
Is it my fevered imagination, or was there a proposed bill in the North Dakota legislature to rename North Dakota to Dakota? The reason given was that North Dakota sounded just too cold.
But, seriously, combining those states (and other multiple combinations) makes much more sense than creating new ones. However, given the current political climate, it is highly unlikely that any state would be allowed to change its status unless some calculated balance was established concurrently. The example given in the thread above was the Dakotas combining, and DC being granted statehood. That makes a lot of sense, but since sense is something scarce in our Congress, I doubt it will happen.
Interesting question: How many congresscritters live in Washington, DC? Answer: None. Their homes are all in the states and districts that they are supposed to represent. Therefore, it would take an intermediary step of granting DC 2 Representatives and 2 Senators who have to live in the the capital city to actually realize why DC needs to become a state. Anyone here who has lived there should understand precisely what I mean.
Hey I lived in DC. They can’t be trusted with a state.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but we’re talking about the people who elected Marion Barry as their mayor. After he got busted in a cocaine sting.
Hmmm… y’all do have a point.
A question: is there any part of the District of Columbia that is not part of the city of Washington?
Are there two administrations, one for DC and one for Washington?
[QUOTE=Dr Drake]
Parti Quebecois was just soundly trounced in the Quebec elections last week. I think the breakup of Canada is an order of magnitude less likely now than it was a couple of decades ago.
[/QUOTE]
And the specific reason they got trounced is because one of their more prominent candidates made a big deal about separation, while the party leadership tried (badly) to soft-pedal the issue. The PQ went from an almost certain majority win to a trouncing, giving the Liberals a majority government.
I’d say this puts separation on the back burner for at least 20 years.
It’s happened twice. Maine was part of the state of Massachusetts until 1820. Massachusetts approved it, a referendum in Maine approved it, and Congress approved it. There were no border issues as Maine was already non-contiguous with the rest of the state.
All of D.C. is Washington, and vice versa. Originally there were separate municipal governments for Georgetown and Washington (and Alexandria, before it was returned to Virginia), and there were some areas of D.C. that were not part of any city, but in 1871 Congress unified the District into a single city of Washington.
The U.S. Army Department of Heraldry has had designs on the books since the 1950s
Long Island, NY tried for statehood and I think it makes reasonable sense (on a fiscal perspective) for it to become it’s own state. But the rest of NYS will get hit HARD financially as a result of the exodus of these 2 counties of Long Island.
How dissapointing. I was shooting for a clear majority.
Long Island strikes me as being more like Connecticut than anywhere in New York.
Michigan’s Upper Penninsula occasionally makes noises about becoming it’s own state (usually named Superior), but it’s got a small population (I think ~100,000) and a pretty small economic base, so it really doesn’t make much sense objectively.
ETA: If they ever did spin off NYC as its own city-state, then it might make sense for Long Island to be annexed into Connecticut. Socially, they’d be a perfect match.
It would also settle once and for all that age-old debate over whether Connecticut has a coastline.
Over 300,000, actually. Which would still make it the smallest of the states as it wouldn’t even beat out Wyoming.