It’s a decades-long quest that has so far been unsuccessful, but a group of El Dorado County residents are hoping to finally get their chance to break free from California.
The new effort to secede from one of America’s largest states is happening in one of its smallest counties. Located east of Sacramento, El Dorado County is home to fewer than 200,000 residents, but includes places as scenic as South Lake Tahoe.
“We all knew our issue was representation, living in Northern California,” said Sharon Durst, who is lobbying for El Dorado County to become its own state. “We have no voice. We don’t have a representative (state or federal government) that lives on the border of El Dorado County.”
Durst, 84, recently formed the Republic of The Golden State group, which is working to collect signatures of support for its movement to see the California county secede, ideally without the approval of elected leaders in Sacramento. Durst’s is an unusual plan for a campaign that has become almost cyclical over the years, with different factions and regions vying for sovereignty, but which legal experts say does not include the legal basis needed to succeed .
There have been more than 200 recorded attempts over the years to secede from California or simply break up the Golden State, including recent ones from more conservative or rural regions. Officials in San Bernardino County, the largest county by geographic size, are considering the idea of seceding after voters requested the overhaul last year; in 2018, a ballot measure—later deemed unconstitutional—aimed at dividing California into three states; and other groups over the years have tried divide the state into two parts or break up a section of Northern California.
The latter effort, which became known as the Jeffersonian state movement, was one that Durst became involved in in 2015, joining the fight for 21 Northern California counties to secede from the state .
When that didn’t work out, Durst said she was ready to quit and simply enjoy her retirement, until her latest idea came up. She believes there is a way to use the U.S. Constitution and California history to appeal directly to Congress for El Dorado County’s secession, bypassing Sacramento lawmakers who have routinely shut down such efforts.
“We think we have reason to base it on the fact that El Dorado was actually a county before California was a state,” Durst said. In a dissertation-like defense of his positionDurst details why he believes El Dorado County deserves to be its own state.
“It is impossible to believe that the men who wrote the Declaration of Independence had the mind to hold a people hostage to an oppressive state rather than an oppressive king,” Durst wrote in the piece, which was published on Substack last month. .
Instead of focusing on the section of the U.S. Constitution that requires the approval of both Congress and state legislatures to change any state’s boundaries, Durst claims that, as a designated county before joining in California in 1850, El Dorado County could be considered under the jurisdiction of Congress as “other property.”
That reasoning, however, has no legal validity, he said Jon Michaels, a UCLA law professor who focuses on constitutional law. He noted that being a county before statehood, which is the case for much of the East Coast and many other regions, does not alter the state’s legitimacy.
Changing any state’s boundaries, under the Constitution, requires approval from Congress and the state Legislature, regardless of complaints, Michaels said.
“It’s kind of one of those things that feels cathartic, maybe a symbolic thing,” Michaels said, “but there’s nothing that can ever happen with it.”
But Durst said the group’s effort has already garnered more support than he expected, especially so quickly. He presented the plan for the first time at a May 24 meeting at a community hall and was picked up at the Mountain Democrat.
“It spread like wildfire, to my surprise,” Durst said. She said she and a small team began collecting signatures Thursday, aiming to get at least 60 percent of El Dorado County’s registered voters — about 80,000 people — a threshold that will decide whether they can move forward with the presentation of his plan to Congress.
“I’ve always thought that California was too big and too diverse to be a state,” Durst said. “I’m really excited and excited about what’s happened… and we just [got] configured”.
