First a county, now the state?

There's an interesting opinion piece in the Seattle Times today, about legislation asking the Feds to consider allowing us to split the state in two, similar to what citizens in rural King County want to do - create Cedar County, to split off from the Seattle dominated portion of KC.

The bill, co-sponsered by Joyce Mulliken, R-Ephrata, has been endorsed by 10 other Senators, would split the state north to south, pretty much along the lines of how the counties voted in last Novembers gubenatorial race - all the counties that voted for Dino Rossi would constitute the new 51st state of Eastern Washington (boy, if this comes to pass, wouldn't that make the folks in Puerto Rico happy - NOT!), with the counties that voted for the former Attorney General, comprising the other portion, presumably renamed Western Washington; the piece mentions that the border counties would be Okanagon, Chelan, Kittitas, Yakima and Klickitat counties.

The author(s) of the piece chide the state legislators for even thinking about this, equating this to be merely a "family squabble", and basically taking the Rodney King route of, "Can't we all just get along?", and stating that the 'sum is greater than it's parts', while glossing over the very real differences between the two halves. As I see it (and yes, this is a simplification), the two main differences between the halves are that Western Washington folks resent having to subsidize roads in Eastern Washington, while those in Eastern Washington resent what they perceive to be "heavy-handedness" coming from Olympia and Seattle.

Should the state split in two? There is precedence for that. Virginia was a much larger state at one time, than it is now. The folks in the western part of Virginia broke away from the eastern part to form West Virginia over the slavery issue. Granted, that's a much more serious issue to split a state over than what I wrote above, and what is stated in the Times opinion piece, but in my opinion that doesn't delegitimize the very real issues dividing Eastern and Western Washington.

If this does happen, I may have to move to the new state because of the political climate ... sigh ... I hate snow, though.