Collin Peterson’s Radical Plan to Dismember the United States of America
The damaging being done by Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson to the Waxman-Markey climate bill is so severe that we’ve got Neil Sinhababu and Chris Bowers both speculating that the world might be a better place if Peterson were to be replaced by an even-more-conservative Republican, merely because said hypothetical Republican wouldn’t have the committee chairmanship (vice chair Tim Holden is twenty clicks to the left of Peterson on DW-NOMINATE; still pretty conservative).
I’m not sure that’s right. I am sure, however, that it’s rare to see a member of congress who’s proposed ceding sovereign American territory to the socialistic dystopia known as Canada. And yet, Representative Peterson has done just that. Pictured on the map above is the “northwest angle,” a portion of Peterson’s district in Minnesota that’s not connected by land to the rest of the United States. The Anglo-American Convention of 1818 stated that the US-Canada border would run south from the northwestern-most point of the Lake of the Woods to the 49th parallel and then west along the parallel. Since the area wasn’t well-mapped at the time, they didn’t realize that this would actually leave a tiny slice of land on the “wrong” side of the lake. But there it is. So to this day, there’s this little slice of America with about 150 people in it. And so it was until the mid-1990s when some Anglers decided they didn’t like certain fishing regulations and wanted to secede and go join Manitoba. Peterson backed this movement and sponsored a 1998 constitutional amendment that would have permitted a special referendum on Angle secession.
40 Responses to “Collin Peterson’s Radical Plan to Dismember the United States of America”
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June 18th, 2009 at 4:54 pm
Peterson backed this movement and sponsored a 1998 constitutional amendment that would have permitted a special referendum on Angle secession.
Uh, seems pretty reasonable, unless you are going to make an extreme slippery-slope argument.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
I believe it’s also the northernmost point in the lower 48 states. Can we afford to give up such a strategic position?
June 18th, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Secessionist, Matt. The term is secessionist. If we’re going to smear the guy, let’s do it right.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Free the Angle from American tyranny!
June 18th, 2009 at 5:23 pm
There’s a bit of land like this out here on the west coast too. It’s a tiny bit of land called Pt. Roberts. Its a little peninsula that dips just below the 49th parallel, so because of some not-so-hot surveying back in the day, it’s part of WA even though it’s connected by land only to BC.
Now, I’ve never been to the Northwest Angle, but if it’s anything like Pt. Roberts, the Canadians across the border would never let their Members of Parliament accept the land. Because then they’d lose a sweet vacation spot on the water. The liquor taxes are a fraction of what they are in Canada, and the prices for cottages is depressed because it’s so inconvenient for Americans to live there! Woo hoo!
June 18th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I can’t tell if this is written with an even or an odd number of sarcasm levels.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Going snark for a moment, the MY doctrine states that if they don’t want to stay with the US, we should let ‘em go.
More seriously, it looks like the Anglo-Anglers would have lost the referendum, since they would have been overwhelmed by the Red Lake Indian band which actually owns the Angle, and numbers some 5000 residents across northern Minnesota.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
What I wionder is whether Collin Peterson has any idea what golobal warming is going to do Minnesota, and not just the Northwest Angle. It will make it colder, not warmer, in the winter, but also hotter in the summer. And more flooding and soil erosion. And more pests. And more diseases, both animal and human, See here. My guess is that if he is aware of this at all, he’s just looking at the short-term gains for corn and soybeans and ignoring all the rest.
Sure, he’s smarter than Inhofe, but he’s no friend to anyone not called Big Ag.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Time for an airlift!
June 18th, 2009 at 5:36 pm
Don’t give me any of this half-measure crap. The Lake of the Woods was chosen as the boundary because they thought it was the headwaters of the Mississippi River. The actual headwaters are Lake Itasca, so really, everything north of 47deg 15′ 11″ should be given back to Canada. Turns out that the river flows North for a while, so I’ll be a sport and give them everything north of Bemidji.
As a Wisconsin man, I’m all in favor of this: we get an international border and the Gophers lose a bunch of hockey prospects.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Secessionism involves states leaving the US. It doesn’t apply to peices of land being given to other countries. Now if Collin Peterson wanted to have his whole district leave the US then he would be a secessionist.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
What I wionder is whether Collin Peterson has any idea what golobal warming is going to do Minnesota, and not just the Northwest Angle.
Yes, he does, that’s why he is against this bill. Global warming is going to do nothing to Minnesota.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:43 pm
Nobody gives a crap about this Angle stuff. Ding the guy for being a closed minded moron who cares more about his agribusiness contributors than he does about US agriculture and/or lives, not obscure bullshit.
June 18th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
As a former Minnesotan who fondly recalls a long-time-ago visit to Lake of the Woods, one which included a boat trip past the Northwest Angle (boat out of Kenora, Canada), I think I’d frankly be envious of Angle residents if they could get the hell out of a country with more IDIOTS per capita (def. Idiot: Republican, Conservative, or Neoconservative) than anywhere else on the entire bloody planet! I’m sure Canada has its fair share of resident nitwits as well, but surely there are tens of millions less than down here. Any port in a storm.
June 18th, 2009 at 6:02 pm
Where “damage” translates to “wants to stop this train wreck that would impoverish us all”.
We now know that China has told us to “go fish” on carbon caps; if we decide to hurt ourselves with this nonsense, there won’t be a net reduction; there will simply be a shift to places (like China) that decide that self inflicted wounds are a bad idea.
I wonder how long it will be before Matt agrees with Steven Chu that we’ll have to implement carbon based tariffs, too?
June 18th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
“Anglers decided they didn’t like certain fishing regulations”
Get it?
June 18th, 2009 at 6:45 pm
It’s obvious from the two posts on Peterson today that he is the current designated recipient of the dreaded MYglesias TWO MINUTES OF HATE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_C992KPzKs
June 18th, 2009 at 6:55 pm
I guess the flooding of Fargo didn’t TECHNICALLY effect Minnesota.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:08 pm
What a throw-away post on Matt Y’s part. Matt, not only are these smear posts weak and convoluted, they’re below you.
# poptarts Says:
I guess the flooding of Fargo didn’t TECHNICALLY effect Minnesota.
Is that sarcastic? Because (at least this time) most of the flooding happened on the Minnesota (Morehead) side of the Red.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:23 pm
Kropotkin: Is that sarcastic? Because (at least this time) most of the flooding happened on the Minnesota (Morehead) side of the Red.
It’s Moorhead, not Morehead. Plus, I seriously doubt that either Global Warming or the Red River of the North seriously gives a rip which side floods and which side doesn’t. The problem is, it’s happening, and it’ll only get worse. And worse. Until people wake up and do something to counter their collective negative impact on global climate by doing whatever is necessary to correct the problem. Gotta start somewhere, and getting rid of Collin Peterson might be the wise thing to consider.
Maybe he and Michele Bachmann could/should run off somewhere together and live happily ever after. To the Northwest Angle, maybe.
June 18th, 2009 at 7:48 pm
Northwest angle fun facts:
(1) it is the northernmost point in the continental US
(2) it is the only part of the continental US you need to drive through another country to reach
Hooray!
June 18th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
21(2) is wrong. See 5.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:03 pm
Manitoba? Are you sure? Because looking at your own @#$^% map (which is indeed accurate in this respect), it sure looks like the Angle would belong to Ontario, not Manitoba. The western border of the Angle is an extension of the Ontario-Manitoba border–a.k.a. the dotted north-south line on that map, north of the Angle.
I suspect you need to pay a little more attention to your map.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:08 pm
As a Wisconsin man, I’m all in favor of this: we get an international border and the Gophers lose a bunch of hockey prospects.
Bitter, much? That’s right, I don’t recall any Wisconsin schools in the NCAA hockey finals this year. More practice, less holstein-tipping, you’ll do better.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:09 pm
Why not just move the 150 fishermen to Ontario? Canada could be persuaded to give them special residence visas.
June 18th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
The real question is, if the Angle goes to Canada, does Peterson go with it? Aw, please??
June 18th, 2009 at 10:55 pm
The reference to Pt. Roberts above makes me nostalgic. Back in the day, Pt. Roberts was best known for an enormous nightclub called The Breakers and a XXX porn theater not subject to the (since abandoned) attempts by British Columbia to censor hardcore. Basically, a kind of miniature, and rural, Tiajuana to Vancover’s San Diego. As I recall, all the high school kids were bused through Canada to Blaine in the main part of Washington State because the population was too small to support a high school and it would be un-American or something to have sent the kids to South Delta Senior Secondary almost immediately across the border.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:35 am
Ahh, the Breakers- best known for the flood of BC residents crossing the border each Sunday back when our Christian right-wing funny-money government (Social Credit)banned drinking on the Lord’s Day.
Now I understand it’s the other way, with young Americans taking advantage of the lower drinking age in Canada.
June 19th, 2009 at 2:39 am
To be fair to the Socreds (not that they were ever all that fair to the province), I think that the ban on Sunday drinking outside of hotels long predates them: may even be a 19th century temperance measure. Gotta remember that the Presbyterian church frowned on drinking and dominated a lot of Anglo-Canadian cities back in the day. And I like that W.A.C. Bennett nationalized (provincialized?) the power company.
Yeah, in Montreal in midwinter, there were always kids from upstate New York and northern New England falling down drunk in the streets on weekends, taking advantage of 18 years legal limit. A wonder that none of them ever froze to death.
June 19th, 2009 at 8:27 am
54′ 40″ or fight!
June 19th, 2009 at 8:55 am
Re #23: Yes and no. Going on the continuation of the N-S provincial border line, it should go to Ontario. But that’s an isolated part of Ontario 9no land route to Kenora and the rest of the province), so while you’d solve the national disconnect you’d have a provincial/local disconnect very similar to what the NWA experiences viz. Minnesota and Lake of the Woods County. If you ignore the line and give it to Manitoba, it’s connected to its “genuine” neighbors in terms of access (although there’s a whole lot of nothing between the NWA and populated areas of Manitoba), corridor to a population center (Winnipeg), etc.
June 19th, 2009 at 10:05 am
Any change in the boundary would add to Ontario’s already overwhelming advantage over the US in good walleye lakes. Some might think it fair, as we Americans have a near monopoly on catfish gigging, but walleye bait doesn’t stink up the house as much and you can mount a trophy walleye in a bar without terrifying the tourists.
June 19th, 2009 at 11:47 am
(1) it is the northernmost point in the continental US
(2) it is the only part of the continental US you need to drive through another country to reach
Not only is (2) wrong (c.f. Point Roberts, WA), but (1) depends on your definition of “continental US.” Since Alaska is on the North American continent, the term is ambiguous if used to describe the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia. “Contiguous US” or “conterminous US” are more accurate terms.
June 19th, 2009 at 12:19 pm
Places like the Angle do not simply belong to the handful of residents–they belong to the whole country (the same is true, for example of South Carolina, and I have about 600,000 American dead to bear witness to the fact). No referendum of the residents could legitimize a transfer to Canada (”One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all”).
June 19th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
@jimbo That President Polk turned out to be a veritable font of trivia for later generations, didn’t he?
June 19th, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Under the U.S. Constitution, both the U.S. Congress and Minnesota would have to approve the transfer. International law would require approval from Canada and Manitoba as well.
June 19th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
I made several trips to the NW Angle as a young man–both fishing and snowmobiling trips.
What I remember the most is that once you drove back into US territory, you were supposed to go into a small, red phone booth and call the border agents. You just told them, yep, my name is so-and-so and I’m back in the US.
I think about this every time I hear debates a border fence or tighter border control.
June 20th, 2009 at 2:57 pm
Since the area wasn’t well-mapped at the time, they didn’t realize that this would actually leave a tiny slice of land on the “wrong” side of the lake. But there it is. So to this day, there’s this little slice of America with about 150 people in it. And so it was until the mid-1990s when some Anglers decided they didn’t like certain fishing regulations and wanted to secede and go join Manitoba. Peterson backed this movement and sponsored a 1998 constitutional amendment that would have permitted a special referendum on Angle secession.
Seems reasonable. There’s another similar place in Washington State, Point Roberts, that isn’t connected to the US by land – but the people there want to stay in the US. If the folks in the Angle don’t, let them join Canada.
June 21st, 2009 at 7:25 pm
[...] blogs on both sides of the ideological divide knows what I am talking about. Take Matt Yglesias. Map. Bar graph. Figure. Those are consecutive [...]
June 23rd, 2009 at 5:26 pm
[...] the left has tended to focus on the imperfections in the Waxman-Markey bill or the depredations of secessionist Minnesota Representative Collin Peterson. But lurking in CAP/AF Supreme Leader John Podesta’s [...]