With the number of Californians demanding secession soaring post-election, President Trump maybe just about to give them another reason for Caliexit. While all eyes and ears were focused on his Russian comments, President Trump had some choice words for Californians during his recent interview with Fox's Bill O'Reilly.
As McClatchy reports, responding to a question from O’Reilly about efforts by Democratic state legislators to make California a de-facto “sanctuary state” that would restrict state and local law enforcement, including school police and security departments, from using their resources to aid federal authorities in immigration enforcement.
“I think it’s ridiculous. Sanctuary cities, as you know, I’m very much opposed to sanctuary cities. They breed crime, there’s a lot of problems,” Trump said.
“If we have to, we’ll defund,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News host Bill O’Reilly before the Super Bowl. “We give tremendous amounts of money to California, California in many ways is out of control, as you know.”
Trump told O’Reilly that he didn’t want to defund a state or a city and would like to give them “the money they need to properly operate.”
But the president added that “if they’re going to have sanctuary cities, we may have to do that. Certainly that would be a weapon.”
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/article130943469.html/video-embed
The number of Californians who would rather see their state a sovereign nation than part of the United States jumped to 32 percent, a new Reuters/Ipsos opinion poll showed earlier this week. In 2014, it was only 20 percent.
Perhaps the new border wall will look more like this after all?
As a reminder, a proposal for California to break away from the United States has been submitted to the Secretary of State's Office in the state capital. If it qualifies, it could trigger a vote on whether the most populous US state should become a separate nation. As RT reports, the group behind the proposal, Yes California Independence Campaign, was cleared on Thursday by Californian Secretary of State Alex Padilla to begin the bid to collect some 600,000 voter signatures required to put the ambitious plan on the ballot, AP reported.
The initiative would ask voters to repeal part of the state constitution that declares California an “inseparable part of the United States of America.”
Being a US state is “no longer serving California’s best interests,” the movement claims.
“Not only is California forced to subsidize this massive military budget with our taxes, but Californians are sent off to fight in wars that often do more to perpetuate terrorism than to abate it. The only reason terrorists might want to attack us is because we are part of the United States and are guilty by association. Not being a part of that country will make California a less likely target of retaliation by its enemies,” the campaign argues, among other things.
“America already hates California, and America votes on emotions,” Marcus Evans, vice-president of Yes California told to the Los Angeles Times.
“I think we'd have the votes today if we held it,” he added.
It must submit the valid voter signatures by July 25 to qualify for the November 2018 ballot.