Transcription
Let's talk about the possibility of a soft secession to effectively end Donald Trump's reign and his administration. I'm going to explain to you what that is. It is not states actually seceding from the Union, but maybe first, we'll just kind of contextualize it.
There's this term national divorce that's often used. It's every few months. It usually is heard from a Republican elected official or like a right wing influencer, and they have this imaginary idea of a red utopia where the red states courageously and powerfully secede from Washington. DC is tyranny. They go out on their own, and they make this incredible, flawless, perfect society made up of places like Texas and Mississippi and Louisiana. You be the judge as to whether that would work or what what that would look like.
But there's this reality we usually come up against, which is actually seceding from the union, is very difficult. The US Constitution doesn't provide a legal pathway for states to leave the Union. The Civil War and the Supreme Court case, Texas V white in 1869 sort of attempted to settle this matter, which is, states can't unilaterally secede. Texas can't say we're out of the United States, and with that declaration alone, be out of the United States.
Now, even if they could, even if states unilaterally seceding was a thing, the logistics would be very difficult. Who gets the military bases, who assumes the national debt or portions thereof? How do you divide up infrastructure? How do you divide up trade routes? What about water rights that flow from one state to another? So there might be individual answers to each of those things, but the bigger story is the secessionists talk about walking away from the United States, but they never deal with how you disentangle the electric grid, the interstate highway system and so many of these other things.
And then you've also got the human side, which is that you would have 10s of millions of Americans living in politically opposite states from their own party preference. So like, Texas secedes and becomes part of red America. But what about Austin? The people in Austin certainly would rather be part of the blue America rather than the red America that their state becomes a part of. So then, what about population swaps? It's chaos. The point I'm trying to make here is it's complete and total chaos, even if it could be done.
But that's what gets us to what is being now referred to as a soft secession. Nobody needs to secede formally, but blue states could just stop paying for everybody else. Now I'm going to explain it, and the math is very, very brutal. For decades, blue states, many blue states, have been net donors to the federal government. What does this mean? They send in more in federal taxes than they get back in federal spending for red states on average, the opposite is true. Red states, on average, are net takers. They rely on Washington DC to fund basic services subsidized by mostly blue states.
So like, for example, in 2022 New Jersey for every dollar it sent to the federal government, New Jersey got back only 91 cents. In other words, New Jersey would be better off not doing any of that. Now this puts aside infrastructure and intangibles, but just on a purely financial basis, New Jersey would be better off not doing it. New York got 93 cents for every dollar it sent in California got 99 cents for every dollar, which is closed. But California so huge that that one penny difference actually makes a very big deal.
Now you look at the other end of the spectrum, Mississippi that this is just nuts. Mississippi received $2.53 for every dollar it sent to the federal government. West Virginia got $2.36 Alabama got $2.02 so the point here is red states are keeping their lights on, not with their own tax base. They're running on subsidies paid for by the very blue states that they despise and that they want to insult because of the Democratic governor and the Democratic mayor and so on and so forth.
So a soft secession essentially means the donor states back out of the deal. They fix the glitch. To take a phrase from the movie Office Space, they could decline to administer certain federal programs. They just go, we're not going to participate. Money's not going out. Money is not going in. Right? They could reduce their participation in competitive grant programs. They could design state policies that make federal aid less necessary. And you could frame all of this in sort of like local control language. You don't even need to do a big declaration. You don't need fireworks, you don't say it's because of Trumpism. You just slowly shift money and dependence away from Washington DC.
This would devastate, devastate the red states without the federal cash, the red states would face budget shortfalls. They would see further cuts to already disastrous education systems, cuts to health care, degraded infrastructure, cuts to emergency services, and unlike the blue states that have the tax base themselves, they have more diversified economies, on average, they would not be able to replace those dollars. And the irony here is a hard to miss one the states that really loudly yell about freedom from the tyranny of DC are the ones that can't afford that freedom. They just they don't have the money for it. They don't have the tax space for it. And if blue states called their bluff, wouldn't be a civil war. It wouldn't be any formal secession, it would just be a calculated financial unplugging.
Now what are the possible problems with this? One problem is there are many federal dollars that come with strings attached. If a state wants the money, it has to follow certain federal rules, like Medicaid coverage rules, or to get road funds, your highway speed limits have to be in compliance. This sort of thing. A state can deal with that by just saying, No thanks to the money, it's legal, but the state does have to replace those funds. That can be expensive. So that's contention number one.
Number two, there's federal preemption in some areas. Federal law overrides state law. State laws can't block or contradict certain federal laws, even if they want to, like air traffic control, I think would be an example. The workaround is, even if the blue states can't stop the program itself, they can refuse to run it, or they can just refuse to do any enforcement. Now, there's no doubt that this is messy and chaotic, but this is what could be done.
There's also like interstate compacts, the these are federal programs that involve deals between multiple states, water sharing, for example, rail systems, disaster planning, to some degree, if you drop out of that, you might be in violation of those agreements. Well, then you've got to negotiate some alternative. So there's no question that there is complexity here. It's far less complicated than actual secession, and this would ruin the red states and presumably put Trump and his administration in a position to have to change their tune.
Is there an appetite for this? Is it doable in the three plus years that are left of Trump's term? Those are all reasonable questions, but this is the idea of a soft secession. I want to hear from you. What do you think.