Break California Up Into Smaller States

and I'm kind of asking myself, should they stay? Should they stay here in the San Joaquin Valley. I see a news story about how Fresnan's Fresno is among the nation's most rent burdened city. Census data shows thirty four percent of Fresno renters spent more than half of their income on rent in twenty twenty three, the fourth highest rate of cities with more than two hundred thousand households

in the nation. According to the news website Axios, the only cities to beat Fresno were Port Saint Lucy, Cape Carrall and Palm Bay, Florida, with Miami in fifth place. I'm gonna take a wild guess that Fresno has kind of a lower average income than all of those cities. I don't know they're parts of Miami, I think that are more low income. But that's kind of that's kind of disturbing. And I've been thinking this for myself, just looking around at like, Okay, you know, I got a

job that was sort of potentially shopped me. It's not a job I would ever take because it's in Idaho, and I was sort of looking at it and I'm like, Okay, well I could make a little bit more than I make now. And the cost of living to go live in Idaho. To live in Idaho.

for someone who is from here. And I guess I want to emphasize that I think there is a problem in modern America with sort of the you know, between air travel, car travel interstate highways and people having more social mobility. There's more of a tendency for especially the better educated you are, for people to move away from their hometowns. And you see the concept of brain drain, where really smart college graduates tend to leave their hometowns

and flock to consolidate to the big cities. I had a bunch of friends from Notre Dame who are from all over and a lot of whom just wound up in Chicago, wound up in Chicago, wound up in New York. I'm sure there's a lot of kids who in colleges up and down California who maybe are from Fresno or are from here or from there, and they wind up in Los Angeles. They wind up in the Bay Area. Why because that's where the jobs are for students with elite degrees. The concept of brain drain is nothing new.

People grow up in Ti Larry, let's say, and they get their education, they go off to college, and they just never come back, or they only come back sporadically or at lower percentages. And I think that's a sad thing, you know, And you know, I see it in my own family. I mean, my my brother grew up here and he's living in Washington, d C. My sister grew up here and she's living in Los Angeles. Why well,

they followed the jobs that they wanted to follow. And my brother's case, he met a girl from the DC Northern Virginia area, married her. My sister because she's working in movies. Where else is she gonna work? You know, she has to be in uh Burbank. And my little brother, who's an army officer, sort of trying to figure out where he wants to be. And I don't know how hot to trot he is about wanting to stay in California.

But there is some and I think there's something really sad about that in certain respects that California has just made itself. California has made itself really inhospitable for people to come back. And I'm seeing this more and more as a you know, older, you know, getting older every day. I just turned thirty seven, and I hurt my back, so I'm not feeling particularly young. But you know, thirty seven, I've got a young family. I've got you know, five

young kids, and I see it. I see the possibility of greener pastures on the other side of the state border. I see, how like, oh yeah, this state is really not geared around me economically thriving. This state is not designed for middle class success, not nearly as much as

a lot of other places are. And I'm lucky. I mean I was able to We were able to buy our house, you know, with relatively low interest rates in twenty nineteen, before interest rates skyrocketed and before housing costs skyrocketed, the housing costs of skyrocketed over the last you know, five six years, five years here, I think our house would be totally out of reach to me if if I had was looking for it today rather than five

years ago. We were lucky. And I think it's sad because you know, where you are, the political community, the area, the place where you are from, has an impact on you. It helps form and shape you. Aristotle writing about politics, he was writing his Polish politics, okay, And for Aristotle, the city was sort of the signature political unit of

his time. The city state, the Greek city state, which basically encompassed the city, the urban center, plus kind of the immediate surrounding countryside, and usually in Greece, because it's so so much of it is near the ocean, the surrounding farmland, plus probably the port. And for Aristotle, that sort of local regional governance was the paradigm. That was the paradigm for Greece, and that was how all of

their political divisions were. You had sparred over here in Athens over here, and Themes over there, and they were different political entities with different governments and oftentimes in alliance with each other, oftentimes militarily opposed to each other. And he thought of politics as and I'm not sure if this was more descriptive or prescriptive or prescriptive. Politics makes sense when you have a community bound together by mutual ties of being from that place, you are that kind

of a people. We are Athenians. This is our national political polis based city character. We are this kind of a people. We worship these kinds of gods. We are from this kind of place. We have this kind of Our military is our navy. You know, we're a port city. These are the economic things that ties the religion and things that tie us, the cultural things that tie us. This is our style of government that reflects our civic character. Where you're from can have an impact on you in

a way. That's good in a way that's meaningful and profound, and certainly I realize in modern America and modern California today that sort of the beauty of being from a place, living in that place, putting down roots in that place, being embedded within that community that raised you. I recognize that economically and just the happens stands of individual people's lives that can't always be Sometimes you have to you know, you have to put bread on your table, you have

to go pursue a job. And if that means you got to up and move, maybe that's what you have to do. Maybe that's the right thing for you to do. You know, you go to college out of state, you meet a girl from another part of the country. She's from one place, you're from another place. You got to pick one place to live.

But when it's September and it's that we've got more one hundred day temperatures coming up in the forecast next week, this is this is the time when it becomes a little trying. I recognize that there's happenstance like that where

people have to move from where they are. I just think that California, you know, I think California is making this that necessity of needing to move more urgent to more and more and more people in a way that is horrible, in a way that is going to be economically unsustainable for the state, and in a way that

that I think is culturally deeply sad. I mean again, I I'm looking at, you know, young couples just starting out their lives, and I'm thinking, man, like, you know, trying to make it here when you could just move to I don't know, Idaho or Arizona, Nebraska or anywhere and just have such less cost, such better economic opportunity. I mean, trying to make it here, it's almost like trying to trying to play, you know, I don't know. It's like trying to box with one hand behind your back.

You're at this like automatic economic disadvantage by deciding to settle down here, And I guess that's what just depresses me, that this region which is really my home. If you're going to say, how do you John DROREDI identify I identify as someone from the San Joaquin Valley. I've never thought of myself as a Californian. I would say probably I'm first and foremost a clove site. I still don't know the I still don't know the adjective for someone

who lives in close. I lived in Clovis my whole life. After I was done with college, in law school, I came back. I moved back to Clovis, probably primarily Clovis, and then my secondary identity is someone from the San Joaquin Valley. I've never thought of myself as a Californian. I mean, I don't even know what a Californian is. I don't think there's anyone in California who identifies as I'm a Californian. No, you identify with whatever region of

California you're in or from. You would probably more so identify as someone from the Bay Area, or someone from LA, or someone from even your particular region of LA or the greater Southern California area. As being from Orange County is a very different thing from being from East LA. Being from San Diego is a very different thing from any of those people identify with regions of the state,

not as I'm a Californian. And yet that's the level at which all these decisions, or most of these decisions anyway, are being made to govern our lives in ways that are often harmful. When we return, I'll dig a little bit more into this and talk about my firm, long standing belief that California should be broken up into several states.

That's next on the John Girardi Show. I've long had the opinion that California should be broken up into several states, and also the equally firm opinion that it will never ever happen. Let's talk about why it should. First of all, why should it? I think when people hear the proposal here, a proposal that California should be broken up into several states, they sort of look at it with this kind of incredulity. I mean, it's kind of a while it's a wild

sounding idea to a lot of people. They see, any ah, that's crazy, that can never happen, even like state wide ballot initiatives that have sort of proposed it as you know, ineffective as those would have been. As I'll explain later, there have been state wide ballot initiatives, you know, pos proposing the idea, and they never really get much traction. You know, people have come up with a lot of different schemes. There's a lot of different schemes you could

come up with. I think that fundamentally, the idea of breaking California up into its kind of distinct regions would make sense. So let me let me explain a couple of reasons why. So there's the theoretical reason, and then there's the kind of good governance reason, and maybe the good governance reason comes first. First of all, I think people have this idea that the boundaries of California were drawn by Almighty God himself and that they cannot be

touched or changed. No, California was a sort of arbitrary set of boundaries, just sort of bounded by the mountains over on one side and kind of going up a sort of indeterminate mountain north. And it followed along the settlements that Spanish settlers like Spanish slash Mexican settlers like Huniproserra who Nimbrosara was just Spanish that who Nipprosera and others made mostly along the coast, but also further inland.

And it turned out that we had gold, and so we had the gold rush, and we had more and more and more people coming here in ways that we couldn't have really anticipated, and all of a sudden, we now have California encompassing forty million people. Should a state have an American state? Should an American state have forty million people? I think you can just safely answer that no,

I don't think it should. Like if you look at the original thirteen colonies at the time of the founding, the estimates are that the total population of the thirteen colonies was in the ballpark of about two point five million, and it grew from there until seventeen ninety it was

maybe around three million or something. So your average colony just did not have a population even close to forty million people, And you can start to make the question of is that just too big for a state government effectively to be I think it is, especially when you look at questions like how many people are represented by a state legislator on average California State Assembly members. Okay, so we have our two houses in our state legislature.

We have the State Assembly and we have the state Senate. California state Assembly members represent five hundred thousand people a piece. California state senators represent a population of about a million residents a peace. That's the most disproportionate ratio for any state legislature in the country. Most state legislators are representing about a couple tens of thousands of people, not hundreds of thousands. State senators in California represent more people than

a member of the US House of Representatives does. So the divide the distance between an individual citizen and their state government is so vast. I mean a state legislator at the time of the founding, like one of the various individual thirteen state legislators. If you were a state legislator, you could probably get to know individually every single voter

you represent. Wasn't that large of a pool. And I think there's something to be said with the kind of there's this sort of political apathy in California, where I think there's a ton of people who just feel like they have they make no difference in politics whatsoever. I think it leads to depressed voter turnout. You can very credibly you know there are more Republican voters in California.

There are enough Republican voters in California that there's something like twelve million Republicans in California if you well, let me put it this way, if you take all the red counties of California, that there aren't twelve million Republican voters in California, but this is true. If you take all the red counties of California and put them together as one, it turns into a bright red state of about twelve million people. That's like more, that's about as

much as Ohio. So hidden inside ultraliberal California because it's so huge, is a red state about the size of Ohio that nobody really knows exists. And to have that many tens of millions of people just kind of disenfranchised, not disenfranchised, but just like, yeah, you're gonna be in the minority all the time, and you must live under

these people. I don't know that that's a great thing for democracy to have that enormous a population of people become that apathetic to politics because they know they're going to lose everything all the time. All Right, when we return, I'll talk a bit more about the theoretical reason why I think California should be broken up into multiple states. That's next on the John Gerrardy Show. Why should California be broken up into several states? There's a lot of

the practical reasons. There's the fact that state legislators in California represent way more people than state legislators do in any other state. It's not even close. Your average state assembly member in California represents five hundred thousand residents. Your

average state senator is representing about a million residents. It's completely insane the distance between your average voter and his or her average state legislator, or it's just a bigger divide than you see in any other state in the Union. You have such a huge population, that you have such a huge population of people who feel like their political views are completely unimportant, not listened to, not cared about. Leads to voter apathy, It leads to voter burnout. It

leads to people wanting to leave the state. And we see that, we see people moving out, we see the population dropping. And especially when you think about the idea that there's basically a if you take all the red counties of California and put them together, it creates a red state of about twelve million people, which is about the size of Ohio. Like there's a there's a huge red state just hidden inside of California that just gets

swallowed up by that behemoth that is California. Now I understand practically speaking, politically speaking, California will never be broken up into several states. Why well, it'll never be broken up into several states because of the politics of it. To create a new state requires Congress to vote for it and whatever state or states legislatures to vote for it,

whatever states might be involved. So if if you wanted to create a new state out of a chunk of Oregon and a chunk of California, for example, the state legislature of Oregon would have to vote for it, and the state legislature of California would have to vote for it, and Congress would have to vote for it. Okay, So to split California up into several states. What would it require, Well, it would require the California state legislature to vote for it,

and it would require Congress to vote for it. I don't think those outcomes are likely to happen. Why. Well, because of the Senate. If you were to create like a state of San Joaquin basically, which is what I would want to keep California as it is, but let's just cut out the middle chunk of it, and that's the state of San Joaquin, Well, that would probably be a red state and Democrats don't want that. They absolutely

wouldn't go for that. Why vote for that? It would take away presidential election electoral college votes because right now Democrats get all fifty or whatever it is of California's electoral college votes every single presidential election. If you create a new state that might be Republican leaning, they just lose out on a couple of those electoral college votes. Secondly, the Senate, it would just add two Republican senators to the Senate. Why would any Democrat go for that? So

Democrats would never go for it. So if you were to break up the state, you'd have to do so in a way that equitably split things between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats would only go for it if they got a Democrats state and Republicans got a Republican state. So maybe you could do something where you break California up into maybe like from one state to maybe like five states to create two new Republican states, two new Democrats states,

plus the existing California. So Republicans add form more senators, Democrats add form more senators. But still Democrats wouldn't go for that. Why Well, because again they're losing out on electoral college votes during presidential elections. They don't want to break California up. If they break California up, that means

they don't get all those electoral college votes. Now, if electoral college votes in California worked the way they do in Nebraska, where in Nebraska you get an electoral college vote based on the individual vote within each Nebraska congressional seat, that would be a different story. Okay, So that's why, like in I think Nebraska and Maine both have this where you could get like one of Nebraska's electoral college votes rather than all four or five, you can get

one in Maine is the same way. But that's not how California does it. If you win California, you get all the electoral college votes. In spite of the fact that you know, if you live in Vince Fong's congressional district, Vince Fong's congressional district is super duper right wing. But sorry, your electoral college vote is still going to Kamala Harris now. So Democrats will never go for it, and that's the procedure.

Congress has to vote for it, and the state legislature has to vote for it, and it's never going to happen, but it should. And here's why. It's some of the stuff we talked about in the first part of the show. A good political community is bound together by ties of love, affection,

and commonality. A good political community has these sort of common traits with each other that are formed by being from the same place, caring about the same things, working the same fields, living in the same spaces, walking the same streets. If you walk the same streets as someone, you have something in common, you have a bond, there's something you share, and that's what a true political community is.

The music you hear, the songs you sing, the in ancient Greece, the gods you worship and maybe here now in America, we've made religion and race less important as the ties that bind a political community together. In some ways that are better than ancient Greece. But to have a tie of commonality is what makes you able to identify with this other person in that other person, that other person, all these people who live in one place. It's why it feels weird for you and I. You

listener and I listen. I talker to say that we are from californ I'm a Californian. I don't identify as a Californian. What even is a Californian. California is such a heterogeneous, diverse place that there's no one thing a Californian is. Someone living in a ranch up north near the Oregon border has basically nothing to do with someone who lives in Beverly Hills, who also is quite different from someone who lives in Oakland, who is also quite

different from someone who lives in Selma. These are wildly different places from each other. They have very little who is different from someone who lives in Oakhurst Like These are wildly, wildly different places from each other that don't

really have a lot in common. I think someone Monterey and Santa Cruz might have some kind of kinship, sort of a central coast y kind of kinship, but that's you know that they're not gonna feel the same kind of kinship with someone from San Diego further south along the coast. California is so big, so massive, so diverse, and in ways that could be their own state. Okay, if you just took Los Angeles County itself has a

bigger population than many many states. You put La and Orange Counties together, they would have a bigger population than most states. Probably it would be geographically bigger also than many states. Rhode Island is a state things tiny. All it's got is Providence, and we sort of allow that. We think it's fine. So I just I find the sort of incredulity that people have. Oh yeah, yeah, you can't. That's ridiculous to cut California up into several states. No,

I don't think it's ridiculous. I think there's a lot of very solid reasons that, yes, it would make sense to break it up into several states, especially when you think about the economic interests that are so widely different. We in the San Joaquin Valley care about agriculture. We understand the need for water, We understand the importance of farming. We understand the important farming is important to us. But we are governed. Our water decisions are often governed our

environmental decisions. Our farming activity is governed in large part by environmental attorneys from San Francisco who view San Jaquin Valley farming as a plight, as a blight rather on the environment, as something to be wiped out, as a blight on the otherwise pristine face of the state of California. We are governed by people who are not one of us, and that leads to resentment. It leads to bad outcomes, It leads to outcomes for our interests being snuffed out.

Here comes President Trump for the first time in god knows how many decades, trying to get some more water to San Juquean Valley farmers, with the biological opinions saying, okay, for basically, what we'll do with water that's being pumped through the Central Valley federal system is we're going to monitor rather than just having a set standard that we set for the whole year that's really really low and really really punitive and keeping it there the whole time.

We will assess fish populations, how fish are doing throughout the course of the year, and we will pump more water appropriately. If they're doing well, we can pump more towards farming from the delta, will pump more towards farming and less towards environmental need when the environmental need is less. No President Trump does that to do something to help San Juaquean Valley farmers at the urging. I'm sure of Devin Nunez and David Valdeo, another San Juan Valley legislators

who are pushing for this. And what happens our own state sues to stop this. Our own state, our own state, our state government of US Californians acts in a way that's directly hostile to our interests because our state is governed by a bunch of people from the Bay Area in Los Angeles who just don't give a crap about farming. They don't give a crap about us. Fundamentally, we are governed by Bay Area environmental lawyers, not by fellow farmers.

And as long as that's the case, this region is never going to have the support it needs for agriculture. It just isn't. And this is why I say things like, yes, I think we should divide California into different states, because

our people should be governing our affairs. We are getting to a point where we're not, you know, self government sounds great until you're just in this permanent minority where a whole region that oversees a huge component of the American economy, a huge percentage of our agricultural production is in the hands of people who actively hate agriculture. When we return, how does the Republican Party find the worst

human beings possible to run as governors and senators? Next on the John Girardi Show, So the Republican Lieutenant governor of North Carolina who is running for governor. This a guy named Mark Robinson. There were news stories hinting that, oh, a CNN story is about to drop that's gonna wreck this guy's campaign. And he comes out with a little video. Here's what he has to say, and then I'll kind of explain what it was that was revealed about him.

words of Mark Robinson. You know my words, you know my character, and you know that I have been completely transparent in this race and before.

an African American politician. Were comments from two thousand and nine or something, a whole bunch of freaky porn related commentary, And he's saying those are not the words of Mark Robinson, by which I think he means that's not who I am today. And his denial is ah, I'm just plowing ahead. Nope. I'm just gonna keep going to my campaign. His denial is basically not really a denial because clearly those were his words. Where does the GOP find these kinds of idiots?

His whole message is this same kind of just ranting like, oh my opponent, oh the lies and the lies and dishonesty coming from him, from you know, quoting your own words on this chat board when you were still an adult. By the way, this not like a twenty year old kid. And I guess we'll see if this guy is gonna drag Donald Trump down with him to make Trump lose North Carolina. It was a very tight rais and very competitive this election. That'll do it for John Girardi Show.

See you next time on Power Talk