Another month, another instance of California walking back a dangerous or destructive policy while smugly trying to assert some sort of moral superiority over the policy’s critics.
California has revoked 17,000 commercial driver’s licenses for nondomiciled immigrants (immigrants who are legally in the country but are not citizens or permanent residents). This comes after Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy issued new emergency rules regarding CDLs and demanded California revoke those licenses, but Gov. Gavin Newsom claims it is actually happening because the licenses were revoked due to some unspecified “inconsistency with California law.”
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This comes after multiple high-profile instances of illegal immigrants with California-issued CDLs causing fatal accidents while driving. That means that Newsom’s defense is not that this policy is dangerous, which it has proven to be. Instead, what Newsom is essentially saying is that California just doesn’t even follow its own state law when it comes to issuing tens of thousands of licenses for semitrucks and other large vehicles, and it just so happened to discover these issues after Duffy raised the issue.
Moreover, Newsom is trying to deflect blame by claiming that California wasn’t violating federal law, and that those immigrant drivers had work authorizations from the federal government. The illegal immigrant who killed three people in a reckless driving accident in Florida was granted work authorization by the Biden administration, for example. But being given work authorization does not absolve California of determining whether someone is capable of reading and understanding road signs before giving them a license to drive a big rig, especially when the person in question is an illegal immigrant.
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Newsom keeps trying to turn this into some kind of burn against Duffy or President Donald Trump, but the fact remains that California is the problem. Trump and Duffy didn’t make California issue 17,000 CDLs against state law. They didn’t make California give licenses to illegal immigrants who can’t read road signs and flunked English proficiency tests. This is California’s fault because, under Newsom, the state has decided to give illegal immigrants whatever they want and only ask questions later when some sort of controversy results from the policy.
This is how California operates. The state’s Democratic leaders push a terrible policy, and then lash out with sarcastic digs at the critics who point out the consequences of those policies. All the while, the only defense Newsom and California Democrats have is that they are just too incompetent to keep track of what their state is doing. As this latest scandal shows, it is not a compelling defense.
