Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented Tuesday from their colleagues’ refusal to let Florida mount a lawsuit that one of its targets described as a “political stunt” announced on Fox News.
The Republican-led state sought to sue Washington state and California for allegedly “defying federal law by providing commercial driver’s licenses to illegal aliens who cannot read English,” as Thomas’ dissent for the duo put it.
He recounted that Florida alleged the two Democratic-led states created conditions for “the disturbing phenomenon of illegal-alien truck drivers causing fatal accidents on the road.”
Although Thomas and Alito arguably are two of the most right-wing justices, and their framing of the case sympathized with Florida’s stance, their objection was formally procedural rather than politically ideological. This case wasn’t a typical appeal that a losing party takes from a lower court loss but rather an attempt to invoke the court’s “original jurisdiction” to hear lawsuits between states initiated at the high court.
“I respectfully dissent from the Court’s denial of Florida’s motion because we cannot refuse to hear suits between States,” Thomas wrote Tuesday, lamenting that the majority “declines to even hear Florida’s claims, even though it has nowhere else to bring them.” He and Alito have made similar objections before, such as when the high court rejected Missouri’s bid to intervene in Donald Trump’s hush money prosecution in 2024.
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Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro,” a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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