Traverse City Record-Eagle

Jack Lessenberry

February 24, 2008

Op-Ed: State looks unsophisticated in license flap

BY JACK LESSENBERRY

DETROIT -- Nobody doubts that Michigan, the state with the worst unemployment rate in the nation, badly needs jobs.

Gov. Jennifer Granholm has proven she is perfectly willing to dash to the airport and fly off to Germany or Bhutan if she thinks there's a reasonable chance of bringing back even 100 jobs.

But in the latest episode of "the government that couldn't shoot straight," Michigan's two highest-ranking Republican officials dealt the state a temporary blow which may prove a lasting setback to attracting jobs and foreign investment to Michigan.

They managed to rule that nobody could get a driver's license who wasn't an American citizen living full-time in Michigan.

In other words, they seemed to be saying, "Forget attracting foreign investment to Michigan. Forget trying to recruit that nuclear physicist from Sweden or that brain surgeon from Canada." They might have well sent a message rippling around the world:

Don't even think about coming to Michigan.

Aand though the Legislature has now belatedly "fixed" the problem, the rest of the world doesn't necessarily know that.

This all started two days after Christmas, when the Legislature was in recess and the press was paying scant attention to Lansing.

Michigan Attorney General Mike Cox issued a long, complex and convoluted ruling that would have an almost immediate and devastating effect.

Thousands of words and many legal citations later, Cox concluded that "it is my opinion, therefore, that only a resident of Michigan may be issued a Michigan driver's license."

Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land is not herself a lawyer, but is charged with determining who qualifies for a driver's license and who doesn't. And she ruled that the attorney general's ruling didn't just apply to immigrants, but to anyone in Michigan.

That stunned, shocked and dismayed everyone from the various chambers of commerce to the University of Michigan.

How could Michigan be able to recruit new investment and new brainpower and new jobs -- if a considerable percentage of new workers arriving were ineligible to get a license to drive to work?

Cox, the state attorney general, then said the secretary of state had misinterpreted his ruling, that he only meant it to apply to illegal immigrants, not people we wanted to be here.

"Well, that's not what our attorneys said," Land replied. Indeed, the ruling itself is complex and, to a layman, confusing. It almost seems to be saying that residents of other states, like Ohio or Pennsylvania, can't get drivers' licenses in Michigan.

Why, I wondered, didn't the secretary of state pick up the phone and call her fellow Republican, the attorney general, and ask what he had meant to say?

"We have lawyers and I let lawyers talk to lawyers," she said.

The truth is that the attorney general and the secretary of state don't like or trust each other very much.

They each arrived in Lansing on New Year's Day 2003. Thanks to term limits, each will be out of a job at the end of 2010. Both are ambitious, and may well end up running against each other for the GOP nomination for governor two years from now.

In other words, neither has any incentive to make the other look good. The secretary of state thought the best thing to do was to have the state Legislature quickly pass a law fixing the problem.

That might make sense in a normal time. But nothing seems to be easy in Michigan anymore. Republicans in the state senate decided to try to package fixing the driver's license mess with bills bringing the state into compliance with the federal "Real ID" program.

Democrats didn't want to rush into that. Eventually, the Real ID effort was shelved, and on Feb. 15, Gov. Granholm signed a bill fixing the driver's license mess ... or so state officials think.

Yes, the bill will enable the secretary of state's office to once again give licenses to the more than 400,000 foreign workers and university students in the state. That is, it will ... eventually.

"We haven't got all the rules worked out quite yet," Land said. "But we are taking names and applications" and hope to process them soon."

Meanwhile, as the governor said, the drivers' license flap has given the state a "black eye" and raised new doubts about the state's sophistication, savvy and ability to compete.

You'd really find it hard to make this stuff up.

Contact Jack Lessenberry at Bucca@aol.com or write to him at 189 Manoogian Hall, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI, 48202.

Text Only