The Alabama Supreme Court has rejected a state senator’s lawsuit to stop Alabama from giving driver’s license exams in multiple languages. The decision was actually an easy one for the court because just about every advocate for business growth and development in our state supports it.

“A decision the other way would have been an “economic killer for Alabama” is the way the owner of one large state business put it to me this past weekend. “Here we would be trying to attract international business while telling the executives of those businesses if they come here we won’t even accommodate them on taking a driver’s test,” he said.

It’s even more ludicrous than that. Most counties recognize the driver’s licenses of our 50 states for various time frames and, under treaties, the United States reciprocates. It helps, however, to purchase an International Driver’s Permit which costs about $10 and can be processed at many travel agencies. Moreover 40 other states give the exam in multiple languages.

The 5-0 decision is of such importance to the state that what led up to it deserves some comment.

The state of Alabama now offers driver’s license tests in Japanese, Korean, German, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, Greek, Russian, Spanish, Thai and Vietnamese. We began offering the exams in multiple languages about 40 years ago, but stopped in 1991 after voters approved an English-only constitutional amendment. In 1996, the Southern Poverty Law Center sued the state on behalf of a Mexican-born citizen with little proficiency in English. Martha Sandoval had been arrested several times for driving without a license. Her suit alleged the English requirement violated the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 because “the regulation had impermissible impact on the basis of national origin in violation of the law, and was not supported by substantial legitimate justification.”

A federal court ruled in favor of Sandoval and Alabama went back to providing the tests in multiple languages, even as it appealed the ruling. The state lost again in appeals court but the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision (Alexander v. Sandoval) overruled the lower court, finding that Sandoval lacked standing to sue.

Under the law, only a government agency is allowed to sue for enforcement of Title VI, the court said. The decision did not, however, protect the state against loss of federal highway funding, something opponents say will happen if it were to again revert to English only. The prospect of losing highway money obviously had no meaning to Tim James, who proposed retuning to English-only in his run for governor last year.

The case got to the high court after Montgomery Circuit Judge Johnny Hardwick dismissed the suit. Only five of the justices participated in the decision. The court sits in two divisions of five justices with the chief justice sitting on both. If five in a division, a majority of the nine-member court, agrees then a case is final and doesn’t go to the full court. The five in this case were: Chief Justice Sue Bell Cobb and Justices Lyn Stewart, Tom Parker, Greg Shaw and Kelli Wise. They struck down the law without any comment, which is very unusual and almost unheard of in a case of this magnitude. The suit, brought by State Sen. Scott Beason R-Gardendale alleged that the use of multiple languages in the testing violated the state constitutional provision making English Alabama’s official language.

Frankly, I don’t know why the Supreme Court even considered the current case since it struck down an almost identical appeal in 2007. Perhaps it was because a state Senator was involved and judicial budgets are at stake. On a 5-4 vote, the court rejected the 2007 case brought by a group called ProEnglish to halt the state from using any language but English on the driver’s exam. In that opinion the court said the plaintiffs provided no evidence that offering the driver’s test in multiple languages “diminished English as the state’s common language.”

The senator was ticked off anyway. Beason told the Associated Press: “The court has said the constitution means nothing. To me, it means we should be doing all our official business in English.”

Bob Martin is editor and publisher of The Montgomery Independent. E-mail him at: bob@montgomeryindependent.com.