A Republican lawmaker in California proposed a resolution to split the state into two distinct parts in response to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plan to redraw the state’s congressional maps.

State Assemblymember James Gallagher, the Republican leader of the California Assembly, will introduce Assembly Joint Resolution 23 to create a new U.S. state.

The new state would include 35 inland California counties.

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Calling it a “two-state solution,” Gallagher says the resolution will protect rural voters who he says will be silenced by Newsom’s redistricting plan.

“The people of inland California have been overlooked for too long,” Gallagher said in a news release issued Tuesday.

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Gallagher’s proposed second California state would include more than 10 million residents, immediately making it one of the most populous states in the country and irrevocably kneecapping California’s political influence over the nation.

That influence is at the crux of Newsom’s redistricting plan, which is being pushed in response to a similar redistricting plan in Texas that presents the possibility of a tectonic shift in balance of power in Congress.

Gallagher intends to hold a press conference Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. to discuss his plan, with support from other Republican legislators.

“As @GavinNewsom ponders his unconstitutional redistricting plan… I like the look of this map. I call it the Two State solution,” Gallagher said last month.

The Republican lawmaker faces an uphill battle to make a “two-state solution” for California a reality.

POLITICO explained:

Longshot efforts to split California into two or more pieces — often proposed by conservatives in this heavily Democratic state — have flared up any number of times over the years, never successfully.

Gallager’s proposed “two state solution,” a phrase more commonly used in reference to conflict in the Middle East, would include most of Northern California, the Sierra Nevada, the Central Valley and the Inland Empire, splitting coastal, deep-blue California apart from more inland, GOP-heavy swaths of the state.

Before now, Gallagher and other prominent Republicans had focused their campaign against redistricting on claims about “good government.”

“I don’t think Texas should do it. I don’t think any state should do it,” Gallagher said in an interview earlier Tuesday, prior to his announcement.

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