Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey recently shared and endorsed an article, "The Great Lesson of California in America's New Civil War" by Peter Leyden and Ruy Teixeira, which contended that America is in the middle of a tectonic shift unequaled since the Civil War, and that all of America should be following the lead set by progressive California, which has effectively become a one-party state, and which picks and chooses which areas of federal supremacy it deigns to honor or ignore.
But it looks like Leyden, Teixeira, and Dorsey have gotten ahead of themselves, because there's trouble arising in the Golden State. California bills itself as an illegal-immigrant sanctuary and has taken aggressive steps to obstruct federal immigration efforts by enacting laws prohibiting state and local cooperation with ICE and Border Patrol agents, prohibiting employers from cooperating with investigations and audits of their workforce, and declaring that the state has ultimate control over facilities used by federal authorities for detention of aliens in removal proceedings, which it exercises through “health” inspections.
In response, the U.S. Justice Department initiated a lawsuit seeking to enjoin those laws. Several cities and towns within Orange County, beginning with the city of Los Alamitos — as well as the county itself — have all passed ordinances or resolutions signaling their unwillingness to comply with California's laws, declaring them unconstitutional, and endorsing the federal lawsuit.
The rebellion has now spread to San Diego County, whose supervisors today voted to follow Orange and its municipalities and to endorse the federal lawsuit against the state. Perhaps it's their close proximity to the physical frontier, where citizens can actually see and experience first-hand the often tragic consequences of a tumultuous border environment that makes them more aware than their fellow citizens in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. Whatever the reason, they are to be congratulated in exhibiting a modicum of common sense.
As further evidence of the frivolity of Leyden and Teixeira's central thesis, a petition to force a proposition called “CAL 3” now has more than enough signatures under state law to put it on the ballot. The proposition would split California into three distinct states, leaving the most left-leaning areas separated geographically and politically from two other distinct and significantly less progressive areas that would also form their own states. (See here and here.)
It looks like the San Andreas Fault isn't the only fracture line to be found in California these days, as the result of strident progressive overreach.