Over the past five years, 33 counties in Illinois have voted to secede from the state, presumably to either form a new state or join another state. In most of these counties, the voters were given the option to vote yes or no on a ballot question that looked generally like this:
“Shall the board of (the county) correspond with the boards of other counties of Illinois, outside of Cook County, about the possibility of separating from Cook County to form a new state and to seek admission to the Union as such, subject to the approval of the people?”
Many of the voters and policymakers supporting the separation note that they consider themselves to be economically, culturally, and historically separated from Chicago and the counties surrounding it. Most of the state’s 13 million residents—more than nine million people—live within the greater Chicago metro area, but that potentially leaves one or two million people—a “state” the size of Montana or Nebraska—who are interested in breaking free of Chicago metro politics.
The fact that the secession efforts keep coming up again and again suggest some political staying power, as does a new development in Indiana: last week, the Indiana House of Representatives passed new legislation creating a Indiana-Illinois Boundary Adjustment Commission. The purpose is to facilitate the secession of separatist Illinois counties and their subsequent annexation into Indiana. This greatly simplifies the matter, politically. Were Indiana to actually annex Illinois’s separatist counties upon separation, the change would not even raise the problem of admitting a new US state.
Essentially, were Illinois and Indiana to redraw their border, the matter of Illinois’s secessionist counties would be of minor national impact. For virtually everyone in the United States, life would go on as it had before.
Yet, the Illinois ruling class, centered in Chicago, is dead set against the idea. Illinois’s Governor JB Pritzker called the secession effort a “stunt” and declared that it is “not going to happen.” The Illinois attorney general has declared the effort illegal. Critics have adopted the usual posture of those in power when faced with secession efforts like these: a mixture of authoritarianism and patronizing contempt.
Hellbound and Down 