English-only driver license test bill fails in Senate committee
NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WKRN) — In a bit of a shock to lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, a bill to require the Department of Safety and Homeland Security to only give written driver license tests in English died in committee today.
“I was pleasantly surprised. I was very nervous about that bill,” Sen. Heidi Campbell (D-Nashville) said. “I’m very opposed to that bill.”
Over the last three years, Tennessee administered over 12,000 tests in German, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.
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This bill would have prevented that, but the sponsor, Sen. Joey Hensley (R-Hohenwald) pulled it Wednesday, sending it to General Subcommittee. That’s commonly thought of as a death sentence, as the subcommittee rarely, if ever, meets during a General Assembly.
“It just didn’t have support to pass,” he said. “Of course, I thought it was a good bill.”
The bill also would have prevented any sort of translator from being present during a test, too.
“If people are driving on our streets, they should be able to read our road signs,” Hensley said.
But Democrats labeled the bill as a clearly racist attack on non-native citizens.
“There’s a huge difference between the simplistic single word or maybe three- or four-word-comprehension you have to have for something like a sign or emergency messages,” Campbell said.
The bill would have cost the state at least $50,000 a year, as Campbell pointed out Tennessee is bringing in several major companies from overseas, like Nissan and Volkswagen.
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“Are we saying to those people who are coming over here that we expect them to instantly know our language? Are we really turning away those workforce opportunities?” Campbell said. “That’s a bad decision even from a financial perspective.”
Still, Hensley contends the move was not racist.
“It’s certainly not that, because there’s many, many other languages in the world that we don’t accommodate. We just accommodate four languages,” he said. “To me, that is discriminating against all the other people who speak other languages that we don’t accommodate.”
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