If the separatist movement is able to gather the required 585,000 signatures, the Sacramento Bee reports that Attorney General Xavier Becerra has granted representatives from CalExit the authorization to put a referendum about California seceding from the United States on the 2018 ballot. While the measure is unlikely to go anywhere and has already failed once, the good news is that through their hatred of President Trump, and everything he and his supporters stand for, the Left is finally grappling with the importance of states' rights.
More from the Los Angeles Times:
The proposal, scaled back from an initially more aggressive version, would direct California's governor to negotiate more autonomy from the federal government, including potentially putting forward a ballot measure to declare independence.
BLOG: EXPANDING LA RAZA SUPREMACY IN MEXIFORNIA

The initiative wouldn't necessarily result in California exiting the country, but could allow the state to be a "fully functioning sovereign and autonomous nation" within the U.S.
This is usually where I mock Democrats for wanting to secede from the union again in order to again preserve what they have always seen as their right to cheap non-white labor (in this case all the exploited illegals from Mexico that save elite Californians a fortune in manual labor costs). But maybe it is time to look at the issue seriously.
Why shouldn’t a free people have the God-given right to self-determination, the right to form their own sovereign government? By what right, either in 1861 or 2017, are a free people forced by the threat of government violence to remain attached to a government they see as immoral and oppressive?
While the legal details of allowing a state to secede from the United States would be endless, especially after some 240-odd years under an increasingly powerful and onerous federal government, all sarcasm aside, I can see no moral reason against secession. If the people of California wish to govern themselves, wish to oppress Christians who do not participate in gay weddings, wish to exploit Mexican illegals, wish to outlaw fossil fuels, wish to form an army exclusively made up of transgenders, that is their right.
Those Californians who disagree will be more than welcome in Wyoming.
No one has ever expressed my thoughts on this issue better than this:
Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better — This is a most valuable, — a most sacred right — a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world...
In a speech about the Mexican War, Congressman Abraham Lincoln said those words in 1848, just 13 years before he would wage war against his own countrymen to suppress that right. Granted, the South started the shooting war with the attack on Fort Sumter. But would there have been Civil War had Lincoln been truly open to the idea of allowing his own people the right to "shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better"?
Despite what the idiots at HBO believe, slavery would not have survived much longer in the Confederacy either way. A minute longer would have been an abomination, which is why Lincoln's cause of liberation was of course a righteous one. But that doesn't change the basic principle involved, and this is a principle of human rights.
People often say that if our Founding Fathers had ever conceived of the notion of a state wanting to exit the union, they would have offered a mechanism for secession in the Constitution.
Myself, I believe the exact opposite is true. Like abortion and same sex marriage, our Founding Fathers never offered any explicit rulings on these issue because at the time such things were inconceivable. What I mean is that it was not inconceivable to our Founders that a state would want to leave the union. Rather it was inconceivable that a state would not be allowed to secede and self-govern if they so desired.
Would our country not be better off under such an experiment? Without the oppressive federal government forcing a single form of governance and even a culture across all 50 states, could we not learn something if individual states were allowed to become the true laboratories of democracy, allowed to experiment freely with true self-governance, allowed to produce tangible, real world results we could all benefit from?
In just a decade, imagine what we could learn from, say, a sovereign California and Texas? Two polar opposites on almost every core issue: guns, religious freedom, energy, immigration, taxes, the environment.
Loathing for Trump has finally removed the hot-button issue of slavery and race from the crucially important issue of states' rights.
This is a very good thing, a seismic change in our culture, in our way of thinking.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.