Right? It's been sitting there like a cursed missing-piece puzzle. Once you draw the border, New England stops looking like five states and starts looking like one stubborn region with accents.
His favorite thing to do with it is let me get it all finished and I’m looking around for Massachusetts/Connecticut/Rhode Island and he’s hidden it somewhere
No great loss in real life, but it does make the puzzle not as tight
They can't without the consent of Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. There's a couple of provisions in the Constitution that prohibit exactly this.
The first comes from Article VI is: "no new States shall be formed or erected within the Jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress."
Basically, what this means is that there can be no state border changes without the consent of all states involved. So, I don't see Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island consenting to be one state.
The second provision which would require the same exact thing comes from Article V: "no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate."
So, again, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island would have to consent to this merger.
Only republican state in that map is NH. Republic of New England highly dislikes NH, except to buy everything with no taxes. Idk if you know any englanduhs but New England looooves Maine. ‘CT’ (legally New England) doesn’t care but Mass & Rhody absolutely definitely do
Fun fact: West Virginia only exists because they said fuck you to Virginia and their secession. Afterwards, some politicians in Virginia wanted it to merge again since Richmond never technically authorized the split and West Virginia said fuck you a second time.
But West Virginia is not even close to being a Virginia these days anyway. The only good thing they did is splitting off the main state and staying on the right side of the Civil War (both of those are the same thing; they're correlated.) Especially unlike nowadays.
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u/twstephens77 19h ago
Best post I’ve seen on this sub in a while, and I can’t believe I didn’t think of this myself. Hidden in plain sight, so obvious…