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Notes -
Alabama Code § 32-6-13 states:
The Alabama supreme court has held time and time again, most recently in State of Alabama v. Catherine Taylor, et. al., that one consequence of Alabama Code § 1-3-1 is the complete efficacy and legitimacy of so-called “common law” name changes (name changes done neither by a court action nor by any specific statutory process) in the eyes of the State:
However, the Alabama DMV has this policy currently in force for changing the name printed on Alabama ID cards:
Now, being required to not just “present valid name change documents”, but have a federal agency pre-approve them, seems to be a central case (I'd argue even more central than voter rolls that no-one even sees) of requiring a person to “resort to legal proceedings” to make “the name thus assumed…constitute his legal name…for [this] purpose”, which would make it a “rule [or] regulation…in conflict with the laws of this state” and thus an illegal requirement for the Director of Public Safety to impose on petitioners seeking to update their ID card to reflect a common law name change.
This is not just a procedural nitpick, but in practice actually a blocker for any person attempting the process, because even if you could somehow generate (and were willing to generate) a paper trail for your common law name change that'd pass ALEA/DMV muster as substantiating the change, the SSA will reject it anyway.
Before I go knocking on the door of the ACLU, or spending a million dollars on a private lawyer to sue the DMV to avoid spending $50 on a court-ordered name change: does this argument seem sound?
It does seem like a sound argument, but it'll probably take the ACLU or a million dollars and a private lawyer to convince them. Spending $50 on a court-ordered name change is probably the simplest way to proceed.
Sadly, I already took this “coward's way out” cutting a check to the local probate court rather than raising the matter the hard way, and am now far too satisfied with my legal name to fuck with it any further; someone else with a similar impulse will need to tackle this.
(I wonder if we'll see the ACLU stepping up on this matter only after someone is actually refused a court order for name change... which they generally only do for sex offenders and other criminals whose “crimes involv[ed] moral turpitude”...)
Its hardly the coward's way out even if Catherine Taylor hasn't been superceded by legislation. Which it may well have been. Given that Alabama issues real IDs that seems likely.
In addition, even if you won, I think you still end up at square one. Now what you've done with your extensive ACLU legislation is, essentially, repealed any rulings, regulations, and indirect legislation that enable Alabama's implementation of REAL ID. Now your whole state is mad at you AND you have to pay for a passport, AND you have get the court ordered name change to do that.
Overall, the initial ruling strikes me, given the date, as an intentional giveaway to Birmingham and other machines in Alabama. Partisan and poorly reasoned.
If any federal regulation actually exists which would prohibit REAL ID cards from being issued in a person's actual legal name, when that name was acquired by a common-law name change—and so far this is just speculation, no-one has found any such rule*—then
*I expect no-one will, either, considering that the passport office explicitly allows common-law name changes, Form DS-60.
**I seriously expect these will never be discontinued anyway, because discontinuing them would harm the voting block of “people who live a lifestyle rendering them incapable of fulfilling the REAL ID requirements”.
REAL ID requires you submit one of many documents with your current name, which would be your common law legal name in such a case. But to do that you need to get a passport or one of various other documents that only is issued by the US government under that name, or a birth certificate issued to your name. OR a chain of custody set of documents from your birth certificate name to your current legal name. Those are:
All 5 workarounds also appear to require a federal passthrough document. Basically a SSN, or the equivalent. At this point the other way to Alabama being REAL ID compliant is known as the ridiculously stubborn way.
So what I'm seeing is, there is probably an easy way to get a non-Star ID that is presumably legal under this interpretation of the law, but there is no good faith reason to challenge the Star ID reqs, but you wouldn't have standing to do that, because its cheaper to do the thing that makes you eligible.
I disagree. If the Republican coalition continues to go more working class, maybe, but if it veers back in the 2012 direction without picking up urban blacks, any Republican state would have good reason to end this. Not only would it disenfranchise legitimate enemy voters, it would make the fraudsters that vote using the information of people who dont vote significantly harder.
Citation needed; that may be how Alabama has chosen to implement their so-called “STAR IDs”, but it is not what “REAL ID requires”.
Even if you do come up with some argument—which would be prima facie absurd—that a State-authorized clone of the DS-60 form would not fulfill the 6 CFR § 37.11(c)(2) criterion therefore “everyone would be mad at me” if I got the ACLU to force Alabama to do that…
…that still wouldn't be an argument in favor of the actual status quo of the DMV (I argue, illegally) refusing to apply common law name changes to any ID, STAR or nar.
EDIT: just for the record, your statement of the situation seems to imply that a passport could be used to fill this purpose:
however, this is false (if you mean it as a mechanistic explanation of the status quo in Alabama); nothing on the DMV website suggests that even a person who brings in all these:
would have the requirement that he still first convince the Social Security Administration of his new name waived. The DMV would still refuse Jo in this situation, and I'm just trying to figure out if he could sue for that.
EDIT2: I hate that your point here is somewhat solid...
...since this seems to imply the only action brewing is for some sex offender or fraudster to sue on the basis that he was denied a court order 😬
I mean, why else besides being one of those or married being the reason for a name change strikes me as silly
The point is, this particular flavor of “sill[iness]” is not just enshrined in law as a right, but enacting it completely, and without any discretionary approval from the gov't, is also (as far as I can tell, pending any assault on my actual motte in the OP/C,) enshrined in law.
If the law is to be changed (regardless of the reason), it should be changed through the legislature, not illegally by some administrative employee too big for his britches.
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