Recently, some of the blue check crowd have been making noise about secession. They seem to forget what happen the last time a bunch of Democrats tried to pull their states out of the Union. Lanny Davis ran a series of tweets recently that deserve some fisking. In one of his tweets he assumes that the following states and territories could secede:
Hawaii, Oregon, California, New Mexico, Washington, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois, and all the Northeast … including Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Guam, and Washington D.C.
OK. They leave. That means they will form a new country or countries, so the remaining states will be The United States of America.
One of the first things the United States should do (assuming we permit secession) is to remove as much of our property, personnel, and citizens back within our borders as possible. We should also reclaim and reoccupy the U.S. property in the District of Columbia. Perhaps the 10th Mountain Division could be tasked with that on its way south from Ft. Drum. Evacuation the Naval bases along the Pacific Coast and in Hawaii would be a tremendous undertaking, but moving the soldiers and Marines out of the string of bases from Ft. Lewis to Camp Pendleton would initially only require moving them to Idaho, Nevada, and Arizona. Most of the Air Force’s part of the nuclear deterrent would already remain in the United States, and the rest could be rapidly repatriated. The various Blue State National Guards would be disarmed of all weapons and equipment that had been provided by the United States.
As for the idea that the Blue States would have most of the manufacturing capacity, the United States would still have reasonable capabilities. F15s are made in Missouri, F16s and F35s are made in Texas. F22s are made in Georgia. Mercedes SUVs are made in Alabama. Corvettes are made in Kentucky. Microcircuit wafers are made in Colorado, Texas, Virginia, and other states.
The United States would retain most of the farm land and other natural resources—and electrical generation capacity.
And then there’s the West Virginia precedent. Already, there are folks in eastern Washington who want take their counties and join Idaho, and much of California east of the coastal mountains is fed up with having their lives ruined by a legislature dominated by the coastal cities. Most of Illinois is ready to be done with Chicago. Most of the rural areas of those states as well as Maine, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and New Mexico would probably try to find a way to apply for readmission to the Union as new states. This could be particularly beneficial for the state formed from southern Illinois because it would be a way to avoid bankruptcy by sticking Chicago with Illinois’ sovereign debt. (BTW, as a resident of Maryland, I would repatriate to my native state of Tennessee.)
Also, the Blue States of America would not be a contiguous county. When the Raj was partitioned in 1947, Pakistan was non-contiguous with India in between West and East Pakistan. The two parts of Pakistan shared a religion but not a deep culture. They couldn’t stay together as one nation. How long would it take East B.S. to be tired of West B.S. or vice versa?
The Democrats had a snit fit after the 1860 election when they didn’t get their way. The result was the deadliest war in our history. I hope and pray that they can contain themselves in 2020 and 2021.
