There will never be a 51st state because 50 is such a nice even number and we’d also have to put another star on the flag. That would look really strange.
There was a movement in Western NY about 20 years ago to secede from New York State. It didn’t get very far. The problem was that it was based on the idea that downstate was taking our money and spending there. A breakdown of the numbers revealed that the opposite was actually the case, and the movement died.
I don’t suppose the 1861 NYC vote to secede from the state and support the Confederacy counts.
6 rows: 9.8.9.8.9.8.
Utah.
Venezuela and Iraq, the former would go Dem and the latter would go Republican. Chavez could be reduced to the crazy yet lovable governor, like Schwarzenegger.
Ah, but it’d be an absolute boon for the flag manufacturers. We’d have to replace every flag in the country. Cha-ching!
People occasionally make noises about splitting Washington into two states along the Cascade range. I think this is generally thanks to the good hardworking patriotic Republican easterners who (a) think that western Washington gets more state money than it should despite the fact that that’s where most of the population and economy are, and (b) want nothing to do with the commie pinko liberal gay-loving tattooed Democrats in Seattle.
To which the commie etc. response is roughly “Hey, look at the numbers. We’re already contributing more than our share in order to support you. You wanna split off, go right ahead…”
(Yes, the guy sponsoring the bill was a Democrat; I forget the full backstory, but I think he was tired of hearing the easterners bitching all the time and decided to get the discussion officially on the table. Nobody expects the split to ever actually happen.)
South Virginia.
Ah yes. Straight Dope. Snopes. Both begin with S.
But Snopes seems to validate that Texas breaking up into up to five states is valid?
I don’t think there’s a real case for statehood for anywhere except maybe DC (I don’t necessarily think it needs to be a state, but the lack of representation is appalling).
Puerto Rico doesn’t want it, we’re not going to annex any sovereign countries, and Guam, the Marshalls and Samoa are too far away.
Splitting states might have worked a long time ago, but I sincerely doubt the inertia to do so could be achieved these days.
BTW, is there anyplace within reasonable distance that would want to be another United State?
Aside: New Model Army seemed to think at one time that Thatcher’s England was acting like the 51st state.
But isn’t the whole point of Washington DC, at least from the federal standpoint, that it’s not under state control?
That would be the actual Federal district. The rest of DC (the vast majority, actually) is a city just like any other, teeming with hundreds of thousands of people utterly uninvolved with Federal matters. The Federal district and its entities should of course be exempt from this status. This isn’t difficult to differentiate. DC is kind of like Wyoming, except that there’s more people and they have no voting representation in the institutions that make laws by which they must abide. Well, really more like a colony than Wyoming, but hopefully, you will see what I mean.
I dunno about four states, but there was certainly pressure to annex Cuba:
In fact, there was a Southern secret society, the Knights of the Golden Circle, which schemed to annex a lot of Caribbean, Central American and Mexican regions as slave territory.
After Castro, Cuba almost certainly will become friendlier to the U.S., but I doubt annexation is in the cards. Cuba was a de facto U.S. protectorate from the Spanish-American War to the Revolution and they didn’t like it. Castro is as popular as he is largely because he stood up to the U.S. and made it stick.
I don’t see the difference between the Federal District and The Rest Of DC.
Are you referring to the Maryland and Virginia suburbs? But they’re not a city. Maybe you’re separating the business/govt/downtown area from the residential sections?
The land/buildings/entities in the vicinity of the Capitol/White House/National Mall are what I’m referring to as the federal district, as they are owned by the govt., which has operations there, and there are no residents, save for the WH and possibly some caretakers. It’s not the whole city by a longshot.
The rest of the city is a city just like anywhere else; there are residences and businesses who pay federal taxes just like us folks with representation, but they have no representation. Taxation without representation - that thing that is one of the primary reasons for the revolution that preceded the very existence of this nation, is what’s happening here.
I honestly don’t understand how people don’t get that Washington DC is not some monolithic federal entity in which every single resident is a government employee. It’s a real city with real people, American citizens, who have no voting representation in the government. The Federal Government is the largest employer, but I reckon Hershey’s Chocolate is the largest employer in Hershey, PA, but that doesn’t mean that it’s citizens don’t get to have chocolate.
Residents of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (da yoopers) periodically make noise about seceding from Michigan and forming the state of Superior. Not much will ever come of it but it does make a nice excuse for them to have bake sales to raise funds for it.
MMMMM…pasties…
The Constitution does not designate the city of Washington, D.C. to be the seat of government. The actual language is:
Article I, S. 9, Cl. 17.
Thus, the Seat of Government can be any size (under 10 miles[sup]2[/sup]). If Congress decided to shrink the Seat of Government so that it consisted of only the Capitol, the White House, and the area in between, that would be perfectly constitutional. The remainder would return to Maryland (from whence it originally came).
Further, there is precedent for shrinking the Seat of Government. The District of Columbia originally included what is now Arlington, Virginia. It was returned to Virginia, and the district shrunken.
Sua
Certainly it’s valid, but it is also repetitive.
Under the Constitution, any state can be broken up into any number of states, so long as Congress and the state legislature involved approve:
Art. IV, s. 3, cl. 1.
The provision that Texas could be broken up into five states was, if anything, a limiting provision - stating that Texas could become only five states, rather than six, twenty, or two thousand.
Sua
What about England? It has the right cultural background, and I can see that the right government might play up the “join the USA or the EU” angle for political purposes.
Naw. I’ve seen the future(rama) and the stars are simply replaced with a picture of the Earth in the blue field. Kinda catchy really.
MEBuckner Aw, come on. No support for the Mexico idea? We could make them stop speaking their native language and stop worshiping whatever they worship and make them talk like we do and believe what we tell’um. That is the standard approach isn’t it? 