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.
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
It’s not that they’re poorly educated (farmers are typically smart people in very practical ways that city people are not), it’s that they don’t have government services to rely on so they don’t understand why people in the city need it as they see themselves as self sufficient.
While true, this is true in basically every area in the USA. If you have a tractor supply store near your house, you’re in redneck territory. If you have a Lululemon, you’re in blue territory.
Funnily enough I have one of each of those within about three miles of my home.
Found the centrist.
Where do you live?
Thank you
Well not going to say, but it is funny because it is a “swing state”.
But realistically this specific area is deep blue, but TSC has a healthy enough market, between nearby rural area and suburbanites that want to play farmer with a couple chickens in the backyard and buying their pet food there.
Cool!
Me too
Pretty sure we have both where I’m at. Blue college city in a red state surrounded by farmland.
No Lululemon here, but there is a tractor supply store and two Rural Kings.
And yet we are a bellwether county. One of the ones at the top of the list with only one error.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_election_bellwether_counties_in_the_United_States
It’s more complicated than you think.
You should see the UVA area, it’s a big university next to incredibly rural areas so it has both nearby
Tractor supply sucks normally but I love rural king and miss having those around now that I live in a major city. Everything you could ever need in one store and free popcorn at the entrance you can eat while walking around picking out new boots and deciding which goat to buy from the latest batch of kids
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.
Living in oregon I see value in letting them enter the “find out” portion of their fucking around. This portion of the state better aligns with idaho, and they’re a thorn in the side of the legislature… they walked out of session to block any laws they didn’t want to vote for, and when a law blocked these people running again, their districts elected their family members. This lets oregon be oregon and rural oregon be idaho… free of weed, abortion, and with a minimum wage of $7.25/hr.
Can we merge Idaho with the rest of the Midwest? It’d be pretty fucking sweet to have less GOP senators.
They wouldn’t want that if course.
However, of they do this, then they would likely make an argument for reallocating electors…
It would reallocate electors as well as congressional seats. Those are both based on population and are already realloated every 10 years.
Ah didn’t bother to look it up, thanks for the clarification.
Though the congressional seats will be a wash, since I’m sure the existing districts already are red.
How about merging them with Atlantis?
ADHD immediately gets lost in futurama
Donovan (probably)
Will this change the number of electoral votes and house representative each state has? Because if not, this seems to benefit Oregon: concentrates Republicans in Idaho while lessening the impact of their vote.
The number of electoral votes and the number of reps is based on population and is decided by the census.
So if this happens, at the latest, the votes would get fixed in 2031. But I wouldn’t be surprised if this is part of the deal. Obviously those switching to Idaho want to bring their votes with them.
Ah yeah. It was the total votes and minimums for Wyoming in Congress I was thinking of. That needs to be readjusted.
Well fuck em, it’s a hard Oregexit. You don’t get to leave and take what you want, you leave with what you’re given.
It’s actually dumber than you describe. Everywhere west of the cascades is like 99% federal land