White papers
Long-form documents on the questions a California sovereignty inquiry would have to answer. Written to be read by legislative staff, journalists and researchers, and to be checked.
Paper one
The Blue-Ribbon Commission
What California’s inquiry mechanism is and how routinely it is used. What Scotland did before each of its two constitutional referendums, in 1997 and 2014, and why the document came first in both cases. The seven domains the Joint Resolution would put to a commission, and the published scholarship on each. What a commission cannot do.
Read paper one →Paper two
The Case for California Sovereignty
The argument across six areas: a society of 39.4 million producing $4.3 trillion, two Senate seats against Wyoming’s two, nine years of balance of payments, the 6.8 million Californians drawing federal benefits, what Texas v. White actually holds, and what Californians tell pollsters, including the number that runs against us.
Read paper two →Both are also available as print-formatted PDFs: paper one and paper two.
How to use them
The two papers are companions. The second sets out the argument for California self-government. The first describes the body that would test that argument, and the precedent for convening one.
The ballot-question result in paper two is 44 percent yes to 54 percent no, in the same table as the two figures that run the other way.
Neither paper asks anyone to support independence. Both support the same request: an official inquiry, reporting in public, with majority and minority findings printed together. The Joint Resolution that would create it is on this site, drafted, without an author.
Corrections are welcome and get made. [email protected].