'Cal 3' California breakup measure is a long shot and bad idea. Voters should reject it.

The Desert Sun Editorial Board | Palm Springs Desert Sun

Venture capital billionaire Tim Draper’s vision for many Californias cleaved from the current one finally will get its day before state voters this fall. As much as we believe this vision for three new states is a pipe dream that faces insurmountable obstacles to becoming reality, it is simply a bad idea.

Draper — who has spent some of his fortune made via investments as diverse as Skype and Bitcoin on political spending backing a previous six-state split of California and a push for school vouchers — says breaking California up would make government more responsive to each citizen.

He insists that the behemoth state of 40 million or so people with its massive $201 billion budget is too big to continue to govern from Sacramento the way it has been.

The fix? Creating three new states, with 40 counties and their 13.3 million people making up “Northern California”; 12 counties with about 13.9 million people making up “Southern California”; and six counties including and around Los Angeles with 12.3 million people becoming “California.”

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Cal 3, as the California Three States Initiative is called, envisions relatively quick action to bring the split to reality after voters in November give it their OK. The scenario has the Legislature taking its marching orders from the vote and within a year or so asking Congress to give its blessing to the move, as required by the U.S. Constitution to succeed.

Residents of the three new states would get to vote on their own new constitutions and these new Californias would have to work out how to divide the assets, as well as the debts, that made up the collective old state. This would be no easy task and would involve everything as varied as the sprawling state university systems to more fundamental, essential-to-all matters such as interconnected water rights for the parched state.

The idea that more locally controlled decisions can be better is not out of line. Draper’s plan insists the goal is to give people more power in decisions on everything from taxes to education to economic development and infrastructure that affect them rather than being dictated from hundreds of miles away.

We expect many see the folly here, however.

While some might see this as an opportunity to somehow nudge the national political landscape in their favor — some believe the split would result in six Democratic “California” senators for Congress; others see one of the three new states as “red,” with GOP senators — the Golden State is much more powerful as a single entity wielding the clout of the world’s fifth-largest economy. It would be foolish to throw that away.

In addition, it’s hard to imagine the breakup occurring even if voters say yes. The legal battles — and the time and treasure they might consume — over whether this type of drastic re-creation of an entire state can be accomplished via a signature drive is daunting. More likely will be years of legal battles over if the vote meant anything at all, or whether an unwilling Legislature can be compelled to go along with it and make the necessary congressional requests.

What Congress decides to do if it even gets to see the idea is yet another wild card. Submitting California’s geographical integrity to the whims of a politically motivated national legislature likely would go nowhere. A prior attempt to split California that made it to Congress died due to inaction as the Civil War broke out.

Despite Mr. Draper’s large investments to date toward his goal to break us up, this initiative amounts to just another distraction on what could be a very long ballot involving scores of candidates and other measure, local and statewide. Voters should reject it and move on.