On Tuesday, voters in Crook County passed measure 7-86, which asked voters if they support negotiations to move the Oregon/Idaho border to include Crook County in Idaho. The measure is passing with 53% of the vote, and makes Crook County the 13th county in eastern Oregon to pass a Greater Idaho measure.
So I am from WA and have been aware of this plan for a while.
This is one phase, and the next phase is to try to do this with as many Eastern WA counties as possible.
And to anyone wondering why this is happening, ya’ll obviously are not from around the PNW.
Basically, Seattle, Tacoma and Portland are bastion of liberals and actual leftists. Bellevue is as well, but its only for corpos these days.
Nearly everywhere else west of the cascades is just barely more blue than red, and there are tons of smaller towns with Republican controlled county legislatures and town/city governments.
On the East of the Cascades, in the desert, basically, Republicans are generally in charge of everything that isn’t a Reservation.
Its a bit more complex than this, but it is pretty much ‘big cities’ are blue, mid and small cities and everything else is red.
While I am against this succeeding, I do not think this is as cut and dry, obviously unconstitutional as some other posters here are making it seem.
It is not creating a new state. It is counties voting to leave one state and join another. To the best of my knowledge, this is completely unprecedented in the history of the US.
They’ve got a whole detailed plan for how to attempt to get this actually done. And they have a lot of judges, and now a popular mandate.
I honestly do not know how this will play out as it will likely hinge on various judiciaries and possibly executive (Governor) moves.
Yes, the state legislatures have to sign off on it and thats a big hurdle to jump, but it may actually be doable if enough political pressure is applied… especially if Trump wins.
It could possibly make it to the Circuit Courts and then the Supreme Court.
Can we merge Idaho with the rest of the Midwest? It’d be pretty fucking sweet to have less GOP senators.
I describe it like this… the places where people actually live are blue.
The places where there are more square miles than people are red.
It should be noted this is true for almost the entirety of the United States.
Places where people are poorly educated seem to be mostly red too.
Happen to be more easily persuaded to vote against their own interests, too
There is a legal way to do this:
— Article IV, Section 3, Clause 1
Nebraska and South Dakota have a compact that’s been approved by Congress that has land swap between the states based on where the river is when particular assessments happen. So land leaving one state and going to another state isn’t unheard of. If you go look at NE and SD’s border in the southeast corner of SD, you’ll see the river and the border is pretty tight. Now compare that to states that have no such compact like Arkansas and Tennessee. River and the border are all kinds of messed up.
The thing is, both Idaho’s and Oregon’s State assembly will have to vote on it as you indicated. It’s not up to the citizens to dictate when a state’s border can be redrawn. Once Idaho and Oregon have a compact, they will need to send it to DC for Congress to vote on it. If it passes both the House and the Senate, the new compact can be enforced and the new borders drawn.
From what I’ve heard Oregon will not even begin to entertain this notion.
But yes, this is completely legal in the Constitution and we’ve done it before too. And we even have had the case where we took one state and split it into two happen before as well. Virginia and West Virginia. So we’ve used this part of the Constitution enough to know exactly how it needs to go down.
Is it going to go down? IDK. California said they were going to split up into 3, 4, 5 different States, not holding my breath on that one either. Would be pretty neat to redraw Idaho though. Never liked it’s weird long edge on the west side. Now it’ll look like someone giving the middle finger or something.