Clarence Thomas Ponders Whether Florida Could Start a War Over West Coast Driver Licenses

In August 2025, Harjinder Singh was driving his semi-truck down the Florida turnpike when he attempted to make an illegal U-turn through an opening in the median. The driver of a minivan in an adjacent lane was unable to stop, and collided with the trailer attached to Singh’s truck. All three occupants of the minivan were killed in the crash. Police arrested Singh, and prosecutors in St. Lucie County charged him with three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of manslaughter. If convicted, Singh faces a sentence of up to 45 years in prison. 

For Republican elected officials in Florida, though, punishing Singh through the criminal legal system is less important than exploiting the case against him to boost President Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant agenda. According to a press release from the Department of Transportation, during a preliminary investigation into the accident, Singh correctly answered two of 12 questions on an English proficiency test, and correctly identified one of four traffic signs. And as it turns out, Singh entered the United States without legal authorization in 2018, and like many Sikh immigrants, he found work in the trucking industry, and obtained commercial driver’s licenses in both California and Washington. 

These facts were enough for Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who in October 2025 asked the Supreme Court for permission to sue the states of California and Washington over their procedures for issuing CDLs. (Under Article III of the Constitution, the Court has original jurisdiction over disputes between states. But since these cases tend to be time-consuming and politically fraught, the Court has cautioned that it exercises this jurisdiction “sparingly,” and its rules require states to obtain the Court’s permission before filing suit.)

In his proposed complaint, Uthmeier asserted that this case, Florida v. California and Washington, should pass the Court’s test. Those states’ policies for issuing CDLs, he argued, violate federal law by failing to check applicants’ immigration status or to adequately test their English proficiency, which in turn endangers residents of Florida by putting unsafe drivers on the roads. Unless the Court intervenes, Uthmeier wrote, “California and Washington will likely continue to issue CDLs to unqualified illegal aliens in violation of federal standards.”

As you might suspect, though, Uthmeier’s complaint spends far less time making a legal argument than it does parroting Trump-style rhetoric about the evils of “sanctuary cities,” and of the Democratic politicians who cannot stop releasing “dangerous criminals” into the “very communities they claim to protect.” Many of the anecdotes Uthmeier recounts have nothing to do with state-issued CDLs or the federal laws that govern them, and are just stories published by right-wing media outlets about crimes that were committed by people who are not U.S. citizens. To give you a big-picture sense of where Uthmeier is coming from, the complaint cites three separate reports produced by the Center for Immigration Studies, a conservative think tank with a notably lengthy history of associating with white nationalists.

On the whole, the complaint more closely resembles a monologue you might hear on a Fox News primetime show than it does a serious legal document. This is not an accident: Uthmeier triumphantly announced the lawsuit on Hannity, and promoted it on his X account with a boxing fight card-style graphic and a promise to “fight for American sovereignty and end California’s love affair with illegal aliens.” But as Washington Attorney General Nick Brown wrote in his brief, Uthmeier did not serve Washington with the pleadings—a pretty important task when you are a lawyer filing a lawsuit!—until several weeks later, and only after Brown’s office reached out to inform Uthmeier that it was still waiting on the paperwork.

In a one-sentence order on Monday, the Supreme Court denied Florida’s request, thus bringing Uthmeier’s PR stunt to a close. But in a dissenting opinion joined by Justice Samuel Alito, Justice Clarence Thomas castigated the Court for its failure to address the “disturbingly common” phenomenon of “illegal-alien truck drivers causing fatal accidents on the road,” and for its refusal to hear legal claims that Florida cannot bring in any other forum.

Part of Thomas’s dissent in Florida v. California and Washington relates to his view that, under a proper reading of the Constitution, the Court’s original jurisdiction is less “discretionary” than the justices have made it. In recent years, Thomas and Alito have often raised this objection when it comes to lawsuits brought by Republican-controlled states against Democratic-controlled states whose policies Thomas and Alito do not agree with. 

But the second half of Thomas’s analysis provides some unsettling hints about just how steeped in right-wing media his brain is these days. Under the Court’s precedents, he argues, it has a duty to hear an interstate dispute if the dispute “would amount to casus belli”—a Latin phrase meaning “occasion for war”—if the states were sovereign nations. Uthmeier’s lawsuit, Thomas concluded, clears that bar, because “a dispute over one nation sending dangerous people into another” would be a source of “considerable international tension,” and the nation on the receiving end might have to resort to “self-help measures” to resolve it.

Thomas’s framing—in particular, the notion that licensing drivers amounts to California and Washington “sending dangerous people” to Florida—is typical of breathless Fox News-style coverage of immigration as an ongoing “invasion” of scary, scary brown people. But his reliance on Latin and euphemism here obscures an even more unhinged assertion: California’s and Washington’s actions are analogous to acts of war against Florida, and if Florida were a sovereign nation (heaven help us), it might be justified in responding with armed force. 

The fact that the justices declined to allow Florida to drag two other states into court so that an ambitious Republican lawyer can yell about immigrants is (relatively speaking) a relief. But the fact that two justices would have granted this request—and did so while casually using language that is indistinguishable from what you might hear around the three-hour mark of a Trump rally—is a reminder that when the Court is controlled by a six-justice conservative supermajority, right-wing culture war types know there will never be a better time to throw fringe legal theories against the wall and see which ones stick. 

Florida didn’t get the votes this time. But next time, it can be pretty confident that it has two in its pocket.