The plan · Move 5 of 5

The vote is not the end

A referendum result does not create a country. Under Texas v. White it opens a negotiation, and mapping that negotiation in advance is what the commission is for.

A yes vote would be the most important day in California’s political history and it would not, by itself, make California a country. It would open a negotiation, which is a different thing from a finish line.

1. What a vote actually opens

A referendum establishes the will of Californians. It creates a democratic mandate and it creates enormous pressure. It does not alter the legal position on its own.

What it does is convert an argument into a fact that Washington has to respond to, which is a different and much stronger position than the one this movement occupies today.

Under Texas v. White, a state may leave the Union through the consent of the states. The Court did not say how that consent is given, and no state has ever tested it.

Constitutional scholars divide on what would satisfy it, between a majority vote of Congress and a constitutional amendment, and those two readings describe very different fights. Settling that is one of the seven questions the Resolution names. The legal argument in full.

3. What would be on the table

A separation agreement would have to settle, at minimum:

  • A share of the national debt, and on what basis it is apportioned.
  • Federal assets and installations in California, including military bases.
  • Defense arrangements, and whatever relationship replaces the current one.
  • Citizenship, dual status, and freedom of movement across a new border.
  • Earned federal benefits, where Social Security is portable and Medicare largely is not.
  • Water rights and interstate compacts, which do not stop at a political boundary.
  • Currency, central banking, and trade with the remaining United States.

Every item on that list is one of the questions the Resolution puts to the commission. The Resolution was drafted backward from this move. Where benefits actually stand.

4. Recognition is a separate question

Being a country in law and being treated as one are not the same thing. Diplomatic recognition, treaty accession, membership of international bodies and the practical machinery of consular relations all follow their own paths.

A negotiated separation with American consent makes all of that far more straightforward than a contested one. A contested one is not a scenario this movement pursues, and the Resolution says so in its own text by asking for a peaceful and lawful process.

5. What separations have actually looked like

There is no precedent for a US state doing this, but there are precedents for the general problem, and they point the same way.

The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016, by 51.9% to 48.1%. It formally left on 31 January 2020. Three and a half years passed between the vote and the departure, consumed almost entirely by negotiation, and the terms were still being argued over afterward.

Czechoslovakia separated on 1 January 1993 by agreement between two governments, without a referendum at all, and is generally regarded as the smoothest modern example.

Quebec voted no in 1995 by 50.58% to 49.42%, and Scotland voted no in 2014 by 55.3% to 44.7%. Both campaigns were serious, well organized, and lost.

Two lessons, and the second is uncomfortable. A vote to leave begins a negotiation measured in years rather than months. And independence referendums are lost at least as often as they are won, including by movements further along than this one.

6. Why this move needs mapping first

No US state has done this, so there is no precedent to copy and no official body has ever established what the terms would be.

That is not a reason to avoid the question. It is the reason to put it to a commission with legal staff, a budget and the standing to get answers, a year before anyone needs them, rather than improvising them across a negotiating table afterward.

Every item on the list above is named in the Resolution’s charge for exactly that reason. The movement that maps this ground first is the one that gets to set the terms on it. Read the Resolution.

7. What moves this

Nothing, yet. This move is years from being live and pretending otherwise would undercut everything else on this site.

It is here because a plan that stops at the vote is not a plan, and because Californians deciding whether to support this are entitled to see the whole road, including the part still in fog.