Please Mr. Trump—Deport California!
This column was first published with Zócalo Public Square. Photo Via Flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
How do you get yourself thrown out of a ballgame? The late Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel, who was ejected from 40 major league games, believed in blending persistence and obnoxiousness: “You just gotta argue with the umpire until he gets tired of listening to you.”
How do you get your state thrown out of the country? If Californians want independence from the United States, they could do worse than to follow the strategy of Stengel, who made his home in Glendale.
Provoking Trump to eject us would be faster, cleaner, and more practical than secession. And, with California in grave and immediate danger from the U.S. government, those advantages matter.
The White House is occupied by a self-described dictator who is ignoring law and shredding the constitution. He promised retribution against our state, and he’s delivering. He is deporting our neighbors (even when they are here legally), withholding emergency aid, freezing funding, dismantling agencies, disobeying court rulings, firing civil servants for disloyalty, putting tariffs on our economic partners, revoking environmental policies, imposing a health secretary devoted to bringing back deadly childhood diseases, and ordering a dangerous flooding of the Central Valley.
No wonder polling shows historically high support for secession, with more than 60% of Californians saying we’d be better off as our own country.
But there’s no existing process, in constitution and law, for a state to stand up and leave the union. The United States, like the Mafia, has procedures for admitting new members, but offers no method for exiting the enterprise.
Californians might quickly change our own state constitution to make departure possible (we’d have to get rid of the provision calling California an “inseparable” part of the U.S.). But we’d also have to convince Congress and three-quarters of the states to approve a U.S. constitutional amendment establishing a process for a state to depart.
The other states are unlikely to let us go—for one thing, we pay more in taxes than we get back in services, subsidizing the other states. And even if we somehow managed to pass an amendment, the process could take decades. The vengeance-seeking Trump administration seems determined to destroy California long before that.
We may never have a better opportunity to get out than right now—if we can make Trump kick us out.
Kicking out a state does not have an established procedure either, of course, though there might be precedent in 1934 Congressional legislation to establish a process for granting independence to the Philippines. But at this moment, Republicans and even some Democrats in Congress seem content to let Trump violate law and constitution. And the Trump administration has signaled that it won’t follow court decisions, so judges couldn’t prevent our ejection if they tried.
Trump and his MAGA supporters have enormous incentives to get California out of the union. The evaporation of our electoral votes would all but assure them of winning national elections for years to come. Ejecting California would slow the flood of legal challenges to Trump policies. And it would be the most effective way to get rid of millions of immigrants. (Deportation is costly, time-consuming, and doesn’t work, since so many deportees find their way back.)
“Deport California” is a slogan Trumpians might even put on a baseball cap.
So how do Californians convince Trump to kick us out? It starts with relentless, Stengel-style argument. But the content of the argument matters, too. We must not let ourselves get pulled into many different smaller arguments, in which we defend the laws from hundreds of different Trump attacks.
That strategy, now being employed by Democrats like California’s attorney general Rob Bonta (“Every action that the president takes when it crosses the line, we’re there to stop him,” he said), is too defensive and scattered to threaten Trump. The strategy also counts on Trump obeying court rulings that overturn his policies.
Instead, we need to get in Trump’s face with one simple message:
You are not really the president. You are a thief, stealing power and data and taxpayer dollars. All your constant violations of law and constitution put you in violation of your oath of office—and thus void every decision you make.
And since you are not the president, America does not have a president, nor a government. California cannot follow the orders and legislation of a fake government in Washington. It must declare an emergency, and govern itself.
We should take over federal lands, and take control of our own borders. We should stand up California versions of the many federal agencies being dismantled by Trump, and hire the skilled government experts—scientists, doctors, lawyers, FBI investigators—he has let go.
Trump will be infuriated, and will lash out in response. But he will be in a box. He will say we are violating the law and the constitution—we will invite him to look in a mirror. If the Supreme Court backs him, he will say we are ignoring court rulings—we will hand him a second mirror. He will call us criminals—and, well, you get the idea. He might even say that we are leading an insurrection against the government, and we will calmly point out that he himself is an insurrectionist, and thus can’t hold the presidency under the plain language of the 14th Amendment.
Some will say this ejection strategy is risky, and could lead to escalation and violence. But our current strategy—of trying to delay and muddle through, to mollify the tyrant in the White House—carries all the same risks. Surrendering to bullies makes them more dangerous.
Trump will try to provoke us, by arresting our political leaders or sending out the military. We must stay calm and keep pointing out that he’s not the president and has no real authority. When we protest, we should remain peaceful, and lean heavily on public readings of the Declaration of Independence.
We also should get right to work on instituting our new government, so that we are prepared when Trump kicks us out of the game.
By then, California must be ready to form a new American republic, whose very existence might keep freedom and democracy alive in this land, now occupied by the United States.
