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Comment by jlmorton | Hacker News Reader

I wonder, what would happen in the United States if California decided it wanted to secede, the Congress passed a resolution opposing it, the President said it was illegal, and the Supreme Court concurred and ruled the vote itself illegal.

Would the US allow the vote to proceed?

It certainly is illegal for any US State to secede, and we fought one of the bloodiest wars in the history of the world over it.

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> Would the US allow the vote to proceed?

It'd be unconstitutional to interfere in California's referendum process. The referendum wouldn't have any legal force, so why bother interfering anyhow?

California probably will have a succession vote, along with several other West-Coast states, after the Rs gain control of 37 legislatures and pass a series of bigoted Constitutional amendments. I hope that such votes are not violently suppressed, and I'm glad we're seeing object lessons in how awful that tactic is. This isn't the 1860s; we don't have a Lincoln.

> "...a series of bigoted Constitutional amendments."

Any specific amendments you'd care to share? I haven't heard of any such plans.

I suspect the first will be related to who may or may not use particular public restrooms, since that is an issue of particular interest to many of their supporters. After that, one could imagine something about police tactics, because after all there's nothing more important than the ease with which our boys in blue may brutalize unfortunates.

The details might vary, but this nation is off the leash now, if in fact a nation that gets in so many wars and brutalizes so many different subsets of its people could ever have been said to have been on one. Our rulers have always distracted us from their predations with shit like this, but as the stories get harder to keep straight the distractions have to get bigger.

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