State of Jefferson, state of frustration

Many residents of Del Norte and Tehama counties are upset, as in, "We're being ignored."
Nobody cares, they say, what they think or what they need, especially all the nobodies in Sacramento. Next week they will go to the polls and express their anger on an advisory measure that asks each county's board of supervisors to join a wider effort to form the nation's 51st state.


Signs such as this dot the extreme north state.

Elected officials in Glenn, Modoc, Siskiyou and Yuba counties already have voted to join the movement. Butte County supervisors will vote June 10. Boards in several other north state counties are awaiting the results of the Del Norte and Tehama votes before deciding what to do.
Backers want to form the state of Jefferson. In fact, in Siskiyou County, voters on Tuesday will decide whether they want to rename their county the Republic of Jefferson.
What's going on?
Consider just one fact: Del Norte and Tehama counties have a combined population of just 91,000 residents. In California, there are 62 cities with populations of more than 100,000 people. Not one of those cities is north of Sacramento (OK, Roseville, population 105,940, is slightly northeast of the capital city, but don't try that argument out in, say, Red Bluff or Yreka).
In what the north-staters longingly consider the good old days, each county used to have a state senator. That all ended in the mid-1960s with the Supreme Court's one-man-one-vote decision that apportioned the state's upper chamber by population rather than by geography.
Eleven north state counties now share one state senator. The greater Los Angeles area has 20 and the San Francisco Bay Area has 10.
In terms of getting their voices heard by elected officials, the plight of north state residents might be compared to that of, oh, most Americans. Increasingly, only the rich, urban and powerful get their voices heard in Washington. A good number of north state residents are poor, rural and, certainly in their view, powerless. Oh, and north state residents are overwhelmingly white so some might draw other conclusions about what's going on.
Rules are made and laws passed without any consideration for how they will affect them, Jefferson state backers say. The north state has much of California's forest and farm land, its minerals and its water, but north state residents have little say over those assets (by that logic, perhaps the state should be split at San Joaquin County's southern border and then Gov. Jerry Brown can try to find another freshwater estuary to tunnel under). It's an argument hard to dispute.
On the other hand, it also is hard to dispute the logic of the one-man-one-vote court ruling. If you were a resident of Los Angeles in 1960, population 6 million, having one state senator seemed unfair given that Tehama County, population 25,000, also had one state senator. Back then, a Los Angeles resident could reasonably argue a resident of Red Bluff had a louder voice in Sacramento.
The argument can be made that all states have two U.S. senators so why not one state senator for each county? But that's based on the premise that the relationship between the counties and the state is the same as between the state and the nation. It is not, and that reality makes it highly unlikely the one-man-one-vote ruling will be reversed.
So, what to do?
North state counties say the only solution is succession from California. Forgetting for the moment the highly complex financial and logistical problems of slicing off the north, there are the political realities.
Under the U.S. Constitution, separation requires a vote of the state Legislature -- where north-staters say they don't have a voice -- and the U.S. Congress, where increasingly Americans don't have a voice unless they also happen to be American billionaires.
The reality is this Jefferson state movement is going nowhere. Some of the arguments backers make are reasonable and their frustrations legitimate, but reason and legitimacy have little to do with political reality. Short of armed rebellion -- and those haven't worked out too well in the past -- statehood is a pipe dream.