Time for summit with Texas
To: Governor Jerry Brown of California and Governor Greg Abbott of Texas
If North and South Korea can have a peace summit, why can’t California and Texas do the same?
The United States desperately needs its two biggest states to figure out how to keep the country together.
Sure, you are different places. Texas is the cheap, lightly regulated, freedomloving counterpoint to California’s progressive, cultural and technological powerhouse.
But you have one big thing in common: You’re both nation-sized places (California has 40 million people and the world’s fifth largest economy; Texas has 28 million and the world’s 10th largest economy) stuck in a giant country whose leaders are intent on dividing it.
The D.C. business model for elections depends on ever-greater polarization of the American electorate. So national politicians now run the government as a spoils system for their donors and politically favored demographics.
As a result, California and Texas, despite their differences, share a common enemy: federal power.
For a century, whichever party controls the White House has seized more authority for the U.S. government. Recent presidents of all stripes have ruled increasingly by executive fiat. Often this dictatorial federal power has been aimed at your two states.
By now, the drill is familiar. A Democratic administration imposes policies that run contrary to Texas’s conservative preferences. And so Texas fights and sues constantly. Now that Republicans are in power, it’s California’s turn to be targeted for its progressive policies— and to tie up the federal government in dozens of lawsuits. The New York Times recently called this a legal civil war.
All this fighting takes time and resources away from your states’ efforts to improve your people’s lives. And the resentments create internal divisions. Both of your states have movements seeking secession from the United States.
The good news: together, the two of you can break the cycle.
Start with a peace summit. The goals of the talks should be twofold. First, for both states to reaffirm their American-ness and commit to peaceful coexistence.
Second, for both states to work together to reduce federal power, and enhance their own autonomy.
The D.C. Mandarins will call this a revolution. So be it. California and Texas must declare that this is not the United States of 1789, with 13 states and fewer than four million people. Our country of more than 320 million is simply too big to be governed from Washington. California and Texas need explicit autonomy—in taxation, regulation, environment, healthcare, and immigration—so they can pursue their own democratic visions for a brighter future.
After all, our states are far more democratic than the federal government, which has a presidency sometimes won by the loser of the popular vote, a U.S. Senate that defies equal representation, and unaccountable bureaucracies.
A joint effort for greater autonomy for both states— pursued through politics, lawsuits, and constitutional amendment—would be healthy. With autonomy, your states wouldn’t be able to blame the federal government for your own follies. Instead, California might have to confront how its oppressive environmental regulation makes building sufficient housing impossible. And Texas might have to face how its lack of planning puts its people in flood plains in the path of hurricanes.
To start talks, California should revoke its counterproductive ban on government-funded travel to Texas. Yes, the Lone Star State has discriminatory laws on LGBTQ issues, but how do you change minds if you can’t meet people?
There is plenty of common ground. Why not start the talks in Californiafriendly Austin, where Apple employs 6,000 people? In California, Gov. Brown could take Gov. Abbott to oil-rich Bakersfield for lunch at Wool Growers, which serves the cuisine of the Basques— a people famous for fighting for sovereignty.
These talks won’t produce the political equivalent of “Pancho & Lefty,” the famed album from California’s Merle Haggard and Texas’s Willie Nelson. But regular California-Texas summits would remind us that, while we will never be the most cohesive country, our collection of states requires some unity.
And that, in our diverse country, there may be no peace treaty more powerful than an agreement to disagree.
Yes, the Lone Star State has discriminatory laws on LGBTQ issues, but how do you change minds if you can’t meet people?