Drivers Licenses

Signaling a potentially bruising congressional battle on immigration reform, the House on Thursday passed a bill that would virtually bar states from issuing driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, tighten the rules for asylum and close a hole in the border fence between California and Mexico. The bill passed easily, 261 to 161. But the prospects for its provisions becoming law remain uncertain. Indeed, the House vote underscored the divide between it and the Senate on immigration policy.

President Vicente Fox called Thursday for the restoration of a California law that would allow illegal immigrants to get driver's licenses, saying it would benefit more than 1 million Mexicans who are "working people ... decent people." The Legislature overturned the law, yielding to Gov.

Students who are caught on the streets when they should be in school will face fines, community service work or possible revocation of driving privileges under stiff new truancy penalties approved Tuesday by the Los Angeles City Council. Aiming to keep students in class and to curb juvenile crime, the council empowered police to cite any youth under the age of 18 who is found loitering between 8:30 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. on school days.

The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund sued the state of California on Thursday, claiming that a controversial measure to allow illegal immigrants to obtain driver's licenses inadvertently became law last year and needs to be implemented by the Department of Motor Vehicles. The California attorney general's office, which was asked to weigh in by the DMV, recently wrote the Latino advocacy group to deny the claim and intends to fight the matter.

Due to a technical blunder, a bill allowing noncitizens to obtain driver's licenses in California--legislation that came under added scrutiny after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks--may have inadvertently become law without Gov. Gray Davis' signature. The Assembly's chief parliamentarian, E. Dotson Wilson, pulled the hotly disputed measure by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) back from the governor's desk last month after it had cleared both houses of the Legislature.

A vastly expanded bill that would enable approximately 2 million illegal immigrants to obtain a California driver's license passed its first test in the Legislature on Tuesday despite warnings that it would play into the hands of enemy foreign agents. Advocates of the bill, similar to legislation Gov.

The renewed legislative push to issue driver's licenses to illegal immigrants has prompted disagreement among law enforcement officials about whether the permits would make it easier or harder for would-be terrorists to infiltrate California. The license fight, which helped Arnold Schwarzenegger unseat Gov.

Deadbeat parents, beware: Your driving days are numbered. Escalating the war against those who refuse to pay court-ordered child support, Gov. Pete Wilson on Thursday signed a bill allowing authorities to seize the driver's licenses of parents who don't pay up. "If you abandon your responsibility to your child . . . you forfeit the freedoms and opportunities that come with being a responsible citizen," Wilson said. "We cannot and will not tolerate parents who walk away from their children."

After a two-year stay, enforcement of the state's mandatory auto liability insurance law, which was upheld last month by the state Supreme Court, is due to resume Thursday--with a 30-day warning period before citations are issued in most jurisdictions. The start of actual ticketing of violators on Jan. 1 in most areas is expected to bring in its wake suspensions of thousands of licenses, at least until drivers can file proof that they have obtained coverage.

A lot of people don't like to read, panic at taking a written test and have never quite understood what all those yellow lines on the road mean. Those are a lot of the folks you share the highway with in California. When it's time to take the California driver's test for a license renewal, one-third of the drivers flunk the exam given in English. Among aspiring drivers who have never taken the exam before, 50% fail. People taking the test in Spanish for renewal do even worse, with 80% flunking.