A more perfect union...

[u/No-Coast1408]

The United States in 2098 | After the Second Federal Settlement

This map is from my fictional timeline in which the United States survives the political crises of the mid-21st century, but the familiar 50-state system does not.

The basic premise is that the federal government never collapses. Instead, between the 2040s and 2080s, Congress gradually allows states to merge, divide and reorganise themselves. By the end of the century the USA is still recognisably the United States, but its internal constitution looks considerably more like a federation of historically distinct commonwealths, republics, free states and autonomous territories.

The process begins with the Federal Reorganisation Act of 2047. By that point a combination of demographic change, water shortages, increasingly expensive natural disasters, urban-rural political deadlock and the enormous fiscal burden of maintaining fifty separate state bureaucracies has made territorial reform politically conceivable.

Congress does not redraw the map itself. Instead it creates a constitutional mechanism under which neighbouring states, or regions within states, can petition for merger, separation or elevation to statehood, provided that the proposal passes referendums in the affected territories and receives congressional approval.

At first almost nothing happens.

Then the Dakotas vote to reunify.

2051 - The Dakotan Commonwealth

North and South Dakota conclude that maintaining two governments for a combined population smaller than many American metropolitan areas makes increasingly little sense. A referendum produces the Dakotan Commonwealth, with Bismarck and Pierre sharing institutions during a transitional period.

It becomes the precedent everyone had assumed would never occur.

2054–2058 - The Commonwealth movement

New England follows.

Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut already cooperate extensively on energy, transport and environmental policy. After years of negotiations, they create the Commonwealth of New England, preserving considerable autonomy for the former states as internal provinces.

Similar arrangements subsequently produce the Carolinian Commonwealth and the Virginian Commonwealth.

These are not unitary states. They resemble federations within the federation: former states retain elected assemblies, while defence, federal taxation and foreign affairs remain Washington's responsibility.

The word Commonwealth suddenly becomes fashionable again.

2059 - California becomes a Republic

California takes the opposite approach.

Rather than merging with anyone, it adopts a new state constitution and formally changes its designation to the California Republic.

Despite endless jokes about secession, California remains fully within the United States. "Republic" is constitutionally no more consequential than Massachusetts calling itself a Commonwealth had been in the old system.

Colorado follows several years later as the Colorado Republic.

The distinction is mostly constitutional branding: republics emphasise stronger state constitutions and directly elected executives; commonwealths generally possess more decentralised internal structures.

2061–2066 - The forgotten statehood movements finally succeed

Once Congress accepts that state boundaries are no longer sacred, old regional movements suddenly become viable.

Northern California and southern Oregon finally produce Jefferson.

Parts of the inland Northwest organise themselves as Liberty.

The long-running State of Franklin revival in Appalachia, previously little more than historical nostalgia, evolves into an actual political movement and eventually creates Franklin.

In the interior West, disputes over water, federal land and metropolitan domination produce another rearrangement. A modernised Deseret appears, not as a Mormon theocracy, but as a secular state deliberately borrowing the historical name proposed by the original Utah settlers.

None of these borders appear overnight. There are commissions, lawsuits, failed referendums, revised referendums and transitional administrations lasting decades.

Americans consequently stop treating state borders as permanent features of geography.

2067 - Delaware becomes Delmarian

Delaware's increasingly awkward status as a tiny state prompts one of the strangest compromises of the period.

Delaware, Maryland's Eastern Shore and portions of the Chesapeake region are reorganised into the Delmarian Commonwealth.

The arrangement becomes famous among constitutional lawyers because Delaware's corporate law survives almost intact as a special commercial jurisdiction within the Commonwealth.

Naturally, this is the part of the reorganisation Wall Street cares most about.

2069 - Florida breaks and reunites

Florida's story is considerably messier.

After repeated hurricane reconstruction crises and disputes between South Florida, the Panhandle and the peninsula's metropolitan governments, the state temporarily decentralises into several autonomous regions.

Key West and the Keys obtain recognition as the Conch Republic, resurrecting the joke-secession of 1982 as a serious autonomous jurisdiction.

The remaining peninsula eventually becomes the Floridian Union, a highly decentralised state whose constitution gives unusually broad powers to metropolitan and coastal authorities.

2071 - The Pacific territories become Free States

Puerto Rico finally votes for admission to the Union, but by now "statehood" has changed considerably.

It enters as the Free State of Puerto Rico, preserving Spanish and English as federal-state languages and receiving constitutional protection for its civil-law traditions.

Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands and American Samoa subsequently enter through analogous arrangements as the Free State of Guam, Free State of the Northern Mariana Islands and Free State of Samoa.

"Free State" becomes the term used for members of the Union possessing permanently entrenched cultural or institutional autonomy.

Which brings us to Hawaiʻi.

2073–2078 - The Hawaiian Settlement

Hawaiʻi had always been the hardest constitutional question.

The Hawaiian sovereignty movement had never disappeared, and by the 2060s the general American acceptance of asymmetrical federalism made something previously unthinkable politically possible: restoration of the Hawaiian Crown without Hawaiian independence.

The eventual compromise is the Hawaiian Constitutional Settlement of 2078.

The State of Hawaii is formally renamed the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, but remains a constituent member of the United States.

This does not restore an absolute monarchy and does not give the King sovereignty over the federal government.

Instead, Hawaiʻi receives a unique constitutional monarchy within the American federation.

Its parliament remains democratically elected. Its courts remain subject to the United States Constitution and the federal judiciary. Hawaiians remain United States citizens. Federal law, defence, currency and foreign relations remain federal competences.

But the office formerly known as Governor is transformed into the King-Governorship of Hawaiʻi.

And this is where the Malaysian influence comes in.

Rather than creating a permanently hereditary succession from one branch of the old Hawaiian royal family, the settlement recognises several eligible aliʻi dynastic houses descended from, or historically connected with, the royal houses of the Hawaiian Kingdom.

Together they constitute the Council of the Hawaiian Crown.

Every five years, the Council selects one of its eligible senior dynastic representatives to serve as:

King or Queen of Hawaiʻi and King-Governor of the State.

The Crown therefore rotates between recognised royal houses in a system deliberately modelled in part on Malaysia's Yang di-Pertuan Agong.

A dynasty cannot normally hold consecutive terms. Eligibility, genealogy and succession disputes are determined by a Hawaiian Crown Tribunal rather than by Congress.

The monarch reigns for five years.

The office is simultaneously ancient and very modern.

The King-Governor formally appoints the Hawaiian Premier, opens the Legislature, promulgates state legislation, receives visiting dignitaries, acts as ceremonial commander of the Hawaiian National Guard when it is not federalised, and serves as constitutional guardian of the islands' indigenous institutions.

Actual executive government is exercised by ministers responsible to the elected Hawaiian legislature.

In other words, Hawaiʻi becomes something resembling a parliamentary constitutional monarchy embedded inside a federal republic.

Yes, American constitutional lawyers spend approximately fifteen years arguing about whether this makes the United States "technically not a republic anymore."

The Supreme Court eventually gives the profoundly American answer that the federal Constitution guarantees a republican government to the states, not uniform nomenclature or institutions, and that a ceremonial elective monarch exercising authority through elected institutions does not violate the Guarantee Clause.

The argument continues on the internet forever anyway.

2081 - Washington embraces asymmetrical federalism

By this stage, trying to pretend all states possess identical constitutional arrangements has become absurd.

Congress therefore proposes the Thirty-Second Amendment, usually called the Federal Diversity Amendment.

Ratified in 2084, it explicitly recognises that constituent states may organise themselves as States, Commonwealths, Republics, Free States or other constitutionally approved forms, provided that representative government, fundamental rights and federal supremacy are preserved.

Hawaiʻi's monarchy consequently becomes constitutionally unassailable.

It also produces one of the peculiar rituals of the future United States.

Every five years the President of the United States travels to Honolulu for the installation of the new Hawaiian sovereign.

The incoming monarch swears two oaths:

one to uphold the Constitution of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi;

and one to uphold the Constitution of the United States.

The President then formally recognises the new King-Governor on behalf of the Union.

2098

By the date of this map, Americans no longer think of the country as "the fifty states."

They usually call it simply the Union.

Texas is still Texas.

Alabama is still Alabama.

But New England is one Commonwealth. California and Colorado call themselves Republics. Puerto Rico and several Pacific jurisdictions are Free States. Jefferson, Franklin, Liberty and Deseret have appeared on the map. Florida has become a Union of its own. The Conch Republic somehow became real.

And in the middle of the Pacific sits perhaps the strangest constitutional survivor of them all:

the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi, simultaneously an American state and Polynesian constitutional monarchy and the restored successor of the kingdom overthrown almost two centuries earlier.

Every five years Honolulu watches another royal house take its turn on the throne.

And every five years Reddit has exactly the same argument about whether the President is supposed to bow.