If it is hostile secession, which it almost always is, the DofI is probably the best written rationale for the justification for secession. It shows that valid secession
1) should not be “for light or transient causes”
2) requires a certain “patient sufferance” while “evils are sufferable”
3) notifying and submitting the facts of abuse “to a candid world” (27 specific abuses are listed in the D of I) and finally
4) “when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such Government.” These are not constitutional dictates, but, as the D of I says, what “Prudence, indeed, will dictate...”
Study the DofI. It is probably the most elegant and well reasoned justification for secession maybe in the history of the world. In this case, it would center around “a long line” of unconstitutional acts of the federal government against CA.
If it is not hostile secession and the feds via Congress actually give CA permission to leave, then by the will of the people through the CA legislature there may be nothing keeping it from happening. But I personally would be against it.
Good counsel.
From my reading, it appears the Declaration of Independence was a unilateral action by the colonies and was not based on the mutual consent of Britain. Or the votes of Spain, or Portugal, or Canada, or anyone else in the international community.
It appears the D of I was an action, based on findings, of the people who signed the document: Samuel Huntington, Roger Sherman, William Williams and Oliver Wolcott from Connecticut; Thomas McKean, George Read, and Caesar Rodney of Delaware; Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall and George Walton of Georgia; and so forth and so on.
The Document was styled “Declaration” of Independence - not “Petition” of Independence.
My understanding, from reading the D of I, is “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
Further, “That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as TO THEM (emphasis added) shall seem most likely . . .”
Of course, not everyone agrees with these words. The King of England, for one.
And then there was Abraham Lincoln. Under the Lincoln “consent of the governed” theory the consent of the federal government was needed before people could exercise the right to alter or abolish.
I'm not arguing people in California should leave the union now. There is a better course of action: people in California should repent, change their ways, and act like they have some sense.
But if the people of California decide to issue a D of I (they will not), it would be their decision and would not require the consent of a King.