Sharon Durst, leader of the secessionist El Dorado state movement, knows that past efforts to split rural California counties off from the rest of the state have accomplished little beyond inspiring ridicule.
But she also knows that something has to change if rural counties like El Dorado want to have a fair say in how they are governed. On July 10, she and former county Supervisor Ray Nutting co-hosted a town hall to explain to their neighbors why they need to peel the county off from California and form a new state.
During the event, which was held in an office space inside a Raley's supermarket in El Dorado Hills, Durst told the attendees that California is failing to provide El Dorado County with a "republican form of government." (Related: POLL: 40% of Californians considering LEAVING due to high cost of living, soft-on-crime policies, woke politics.)
Both Durst and Nutting are aware that the dream of statehood means going up against tall odds. For a California county to secede and become its own state, both California's Legislature and the United States Congress must sign off. They concede that the state lawmakers would never go along with it, so Durst is gambling on what she described as a "backdoor" strategy to go to Congress directly.
Durst said in her Substack newsletter in May that El Dorado is technically not a legitimate piece of California. "Congress shall have the power to dispose of and make all needful rules and regulations respecting the territory or other property," she said, quoting Article 4 Section 3 Clause 2 of the U.S. Constitution. "I think we can make an argument that El Dorado County is 'other property.'"
Disenfranchisement drives people to push for secession
California has a unique problem of representation in state government. No state in the country has fewer state legislators per capita, and this problem is especially stark in rural areas like El Dorado County that has a population of approximately 192,000.
In the state Senate, El Dorado is represented by a legislator who also represents voters in 12 other counties. In the state Assembly, the county is split between two legislators, each responsible for voters across several counties, with widely diverging industries and demographics. Not one of the three legislators responsible for representing El Dorado County actually lives there.
Isaac Hale, a professor of politics at Occidental College who specializes in electoral systems and representation, expounded on this issue. "This has long been an ongoing problem in California politics. There are nearly 500,000 Californians per assembly member and a million Californians per state senator, and that's pretty out of whack. You could double the size of the Assembly, and we'd still have the highest number of people represented by the district. And there are serious consequences to this."
Hale noted that with proper education, a campaign could find bipartisan support across the state, not just in rural districts.
"Consider Mia Bonta's East Bay Assembly district," he said. "Why are wealthy homeowners in Piedmont linked with renters in east and west Oakland? They have wildly different interests, and you could make the argument that they each should have their own form of representation. This is a systemic problem."
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This video is from the Moms On A Mission channel on Brighteon.com.
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