The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Florida’s long shot attempt to sue California and Washington state over the issuance of commercial driver licenses to truckers who don’t speak English and are not authorized to be in the United States.
The case stems from a crash in Florida last year that killed three people. The driver, Harjinder Singh, is accused of making an illegal U-turn that caused the accident. Singh, who is from India, was carrying a valid commercial driver’s license from California and had earlier been granted one by Washington state.
Republican-led Florida has accused the Western states, led by Democrats, of openly defying immigration laws and asked the justices to rule that states lack the authority to issue CDLs to people who are not citizens or legal permanent residents.
If he had a CDL then he passed the same tests as every other CDL holder and so is just as qualified. His immigration status is irrelevant.
The implication is ‘if he wasn’t in the country this wouldn’t have happened’, but CDL holders have accidents all the time. Cherry picking this case just because he’s an immigrant is such a blatant bad faith nationalist argument (which will land with the base, of course).
I don’t doubt that there are probably tens of accidents today involving CDL holders that are white christians, likely most accidents cause by commercial drivers are caused by white people (because statistics), but I know we’re not going to see Republicans are not going to apply this same logic to that group.
