Eastern Oregon Counties Still Seeking to Join Idaho

It’s a long shot.  It’ll be on the ballot in at least one county in Oregon this November.  A court may allow it in another half-dozen counties in that state.  Your friends in mainstream media mock the idea.  After all, newspaper columnists based in large metropolitan areas like Lewiston are curing cancer and building space rockets in their spare time.

Five years ago, seeing state lines shift would’ve seemed an impossibility.  The closest we’ve seen historically was the cleaving of West Virginia from Virginia.  And that was simply for the benefit of the Union cause in the Civil War.  But political plates shift like tectonic plates.  Slowly and then sometimes all at once.  Any changes would need be approved by the two states and then the federal government, however.  What has been called the Great Realignment could prove decisive.

This week a former Idaho State Representative told me he isn’t sure there’s any swift cure for polarization and he was among the most level-headed people I’ve ever met in politics.

We’re two sides politically like a pair of celestial bodies spinning rapidly away from one another.

Governor Little hasn’t endorsed the idea of absorbing a portion of Oregon but he hasn’t exactly told the organizers of the movement to desist.  This is one of those ideas that fires the souls of a lot of men and women.  I believe dismissing it as a passing fancy is a serious political and/or media mistake.

Maybe not this year and maybe not 2021.  By the end of the decade?  Maybe so.

The leader of the movement appeared on Fox News Channel Tuesday morning.  You can see it by clicking here.

Keep in mind, marijuana is legal in Oregon but not here.  There also would be other issues in need of negotiation.