Hey Matthew Ygelesias and all the rest of you Suckstackers (hehe), watch us come up with a better “You know, America should really do this: Here’s why” essay than the 8,000-word “innovative idea” circlejerk you published on Tuesday after reading someone else’s Suckstack and responding to each other to the entertainment of no one but yourselves, your $5/month subscribers be damned.

This is America. It’s got 50 states. We need more states because Republicans control too many. Republicans hate America. Making more states is hard but a really good midterms for Democrats might create opportunity to abolish Senate filibuster and make more states. Except filibuster abolition dangerous without like serious fucking entrenchment of Democrat political power to make it impossible for Republicans to win Senate majority ever again. Not so many opportunities to create new states from existing sovereign territory of the United States. Washington DC, Puerto Rico, and maybe Virgin Islands. Not enough. No guarantee Puerto Rico elect Democrats.

This is Iceland. Where National Zero website hosted. Kind of close to America. Tonal shift of this essay incoming because overall point too nuanced and delicate to write like making guttural noises.

Disgraced former President Trump was widely mocked in 2019 when he pressured the Danish Prime Minister to sell Greenland to the United States. A lot of the coverage focused – correctly – on it being just one of a long string of international embarrassments for the United States. Not enough, or really any at all to our knowledge, focused on the fact that there was a historical precedent for this: The 1917 sale of the Virgin Islands from Denmark to the United States. In fact it’s the most recent peacefully acquired still-sovereign American acquisition of an inhabited island territory (The Northern Mariana Islands were seized from the Japanese in 1945).

But it’s the 21st century and business isn’t done like that anymore. Colonialism is not a good look given its brutal legacy, though what remains of it isn’t that raw of a deal to those still “colonized.” It’s not like the Gibraltarian Liberation Army is staging hit and run attacks on British officials. There is no Gibraltarian Liberation Army. French Guiana in South America is actually part of the European Union. Citizens there vote in national elections just the same as if they lived down the block from the Eiffel Tower. Greenlanders enjoy a very high a degree of autonomy from Denmark. Taxes paid in Greenland are largely spent in Greenland. They have their own parliament separate from Denmark’s.

In the unlikely event Trump’s lizard brain contemplated the actual practical implications of Greenland, USA it sure as shit did not do the math of how many votes the vast Arctic landmass would’ve added to the electoral college, because there would not have been any. If for whatever reason the Danes had been amenable to it and the sale was executed then Greenlanders would probably get American citizenship and nothing else out of the deal. Maybe they’d like it. More likely they saw Trump throwing paper towels to their would-be fellow unrepresented US citizens in Puerto Rico and thought “no fucking way do we want that orange sociopath in charge of us.”

Iceland is so cool they named it after ice.

So hostile acquisitions and friendly acquisitions with hostile undertones are out. So is cleaving parts of current states. There’s zero chance of a North Vermont and a South Vermont ever happening as it would require a supermajority in Congress to approve dividing states.

Now, just hear us out, what if sovereign states would be offered a chance to democratically annex themselves to the United States? There’s nothing in the Constitution preventing a filibuster-free Dem Congress and a Dark Brandon from saying “Hey Iceland, cool volcanoes. Oh do you want to be a state?” That’s what happened with Texas and California. Why not do it again?

Hold a referendum in Iceland. 60% of the voting population, not just the turnout, has to show up and say “Yes, we love McDonald’s and TBS.” If not, then cool. If yes then awesome. They sure as shit won’t be voting Republican any time soon. Congresswoman Bjork won’t be a member of the Freedom Caucus. And then there’s all the economic shit we’re going to leave out because this is getting long and you’re probably already pissed off and bored by this piece.

Out of the dozens of small island countries in the Atlantic and Pacific that would reliably send Democrats to Congress there have to be at least several that would cross that 60 percent threshold and America-size themselves. Don’t think big, because integrating any country with more than a million or so would be too difficult culturally and economically. Think Barbados. Vanuatu. East Timor. And why limit it to just islands? Guyana in South America. Equatorial Guinea in West Africa. Join us, become citizens, and help us replace the tiki torch crowd once and for all!