2014—President Jimmy Carter’s sorry judicial legacy lives on. Thirty-five years after his appointment by Carter, 90-year-old Ninth Circuit judge Harry Pregerson—still in regular (rather than senior) status—authors a panel opinion that preliminarily enjoins the state of Arizona from implementing a policy that prevents a class of illegal aliens from obtaining driver’s licenses. The liberal diehard holds (among other things) that the policy likely violates the Equal Protection Clause.
The state policy concerns those illegal aliens subject to the Obama administration’s non-enforcement policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). On the state’s argument that issuing driver’s licenses to DACA recipients might allow them to access governmental benefits to which they are not entitled, Pregerson recites testimony from state officials that (in his summary) “they had no basis whatsoever for believing that a driver’s license alone could be used to establish eligibility for such benefits.” But the relevant question isn’t whether a “driver’s license alone” would suffice, but rather whether a driver’s license might facilitate the process.