California should force Trump to kick us out of country

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Joe Mathews | Zócalo Public Square

How do you get yourself thrown out of a ballgame? The late Hall of Fame manager Casey Stengel, who was ejected from 40 major league games, believed in persistence and obnoxiousness: “You just gotta argue with the umpire until he gets tired of listening to you.”

How do you get your state thrown out of the country? If Californians want independence from the United States, they should follow the strategy of Stengel, who made his home in Glendale.

Provoking Trump to eject us would be faster, cleaner, and more practical than secession. With California in immediate danger from the U.S. government, those advantages matter.

The White House is occupied by a self-described dictator who ignores law and shreds the Constitution. He is deporting our neighbors (even those here legally), withholding emergency aid, freezing funding, dismantling agencies, firing civil servants for disloyalty, punishing our economic partners, and ordering a dangerous flooding of the Central Valley.

No wonder polling shows more than 60% of Californians saying we’d be better off as our own country.

But there’s no existing process, in Constitution or law, for a state to leave the union. The United States, like the Mafia, has admissions rules for new members, but no method for exiting the enterprise.

So, we’d need to establish a process for a state to secede. And that would require a U.S. constitutional amendment, approved by Congress and three-quarters of the other states. Success would require decades. The vengeance-seeking Trump administration could destroy California long before that.

We may never have a better opportunity to leave than right now — if we can make Trump kick us out.

Kicking out a state does not have an established procedure either. But at this moment, Republicans and some Democrats are letting Trump violate law and the Constitution. And the Trump administration doesn’t follow court decisions, so judges couldn’t prevent our ejection if they tried.

Trump has enormous incentives to remove California from the union. The evaporation of our electoral votes would assure Republicans of winning national elections. And ejecting California would be the most effective way to remove millions of immigrants. (Deportation is costly and ineffective, since many deportees find their way back.)

“Deport California” is a slogan Trumpians might put on a ballcap.

How to convince Trump to kick us out? Not with many different defenses against different Trump policies. That’s too scattered to work.

Instead, we need relentless, Stengel-style attacks against Trump personally, with one message:

You are not really the president. You are a thief, stealing power, data and taxpayer dollars. Your constant violations of law violate your oath of office — and thus void every decision you make.

Since you are not president, America has no president, nor a government. California cannot follow the orders of a fake government. It must declare an emergency, and govern itself.

Trump, infuriated, will lash out. But he will be in a box. He’ll say we are violating the law and the Constitution — we will invite him to look in a mirror. If the Supreme Court backs him, he’ll say we are ignoring court rulings — we will hand him a second mirror. And when he says we are criminals leading an insurrection against the government, we will — well, you get the idea.

Yes, this ejection strategy is risky, and could lead to escalation. But our current strategy — of mollifying the tyrant in the White House — carries all the same risks. Surrendering to bullies makes them more dangerous.

Trump will try to provoke us, by arresting our leaders or sending the military. We must stay calm and keep pointing out that he’s not the legitimate president.

We must start building a new California government now. By the time Trump kicks us out of the game, California must be ready to form a new American republic, whose existence might keep freedom and democracy alive in what was once the United States.

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.

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