California Secretary of State Shirley Weber announced Thursday that she cleared the proponent of a secessionist movement to begin collecting petition signatures. Should Marcus Ruiz Evans and his CALEXIT team secure 546,651 signatures by July 22, then the proposal will be put to a vote on California's 2028 election ballot.

If at least 50% of registered voters participate in the election and 55% of voters say yes to the question, "Should California leave the United States and become a free and independent country?" then the result would register as a statewide vote of no confidence in the U.S. and an "expression of the will of the people of California" to become an independent country.

According to the California secretary of state's office, the no-confidence vote would not trigger an immediate change in the state's current government or relationship with the union. It would instead result in the formation of a commission to report on the Golden State's viability as an independent country.

The commission might consider the impact of losing free trade with the remaining states in the union; losing over 762,000 full-time jobs with U.S. national security agencies along with tens of billions of dollars annually from national security activity in the state; and no longer having the federal government cover roughly 50% of Californians' medical costs.

The CALEXIT campaign claims on its website that California — which is struggling to deal with the biggest homeless population in the nation, brutal crime, resource strains resultant from illegal alien populations, drought, wildfires, a housing crisis, and various other problems even with the help of the federal government and over $143 billion a year in federal aid — would be better off on its own, in part, because it could foster its leftist values "without facing ridicule or opposition from states with differing ideologies."

In addition to helping make the state an incubator for a single worldview, the CALEXIT campaign claims that independence would enable California to tear up constitutional protections for gun owners as well as to go all-in on climate alarmism and failed immigration policies.

'US Constitution includes neither a mechanism for a state to secede from the United States nor a provision for a single state to be an autonomous nation.'

The campaigners appear to have been emboldened by polling data indicating a sizable portion of the population wanting to abandon the United States of America.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll published around the time President Donald Trump took office in 2017 found that 32% of respondents supported California's withdrawal from America. A March 2017 statewide poll conducted by the Institute of Governmental Studies at the University of California Berkeley also found that 32% of residents supported secession — but that 68% were opposed.

According to a YouGov poll commissioned by the Independent California Institute ahead of Trump's second inauguration, 61% of respondents indicated that peaceful secession from the U.S. would make Californians' lives better. However, 62% of respondents suggested that secession was impossible.

This sense of impossibility is well-founded. After all, Section 1 of Article III of the state Constitution provides that California "is an inseparable part of the United States of America, and the United States Constitution is the supreme law of the land."

The state's Legislative Analyst's Office noted in 2017 that the "U.S. Constitution includes neither a mechanism for a state to secede from the United States nor a provision for a single state to be an autonomous nation within the United States."

Even though secession is a leftist pipe dream, that doesn't mean the state won't waste millions of dollars learning the lesson.

The California secretary of state's office noted that an estimate of the fiscal impact on state and local government will cost taxpayers roughly $10 million in one-time election-related costs. The formation of a commission on California nationhood would cost another $2 million annually to operate.

Evans, the key CALEXIT campaigner, previously worked with Louis Marinelli on the Yes California campaign, which similarly advocated for secession. Marinelli was exposed for having ties to Russia — which apparently was a fan of the secession idea — and told supporters he was seeking permanent residence in Russia because of his "frustration, disappointment and disillusionment with the United States," reported CBS News. Evans later noted in a 2019 blog post that he had become a "useful idiot" for the Russian government.

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