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ProEnglish's Challenge to E.O. 13166 Policy Guidance
Bob Park, ProEnglish Chairman
August 30, 2004

Good morning and thank you for coming. My name is Bob Park and I am the chairman of ProEnglish.

ProEnglish is a national non-profit organization dedicated to preserving English as our common language and making it the official language at all levels of government. We are proud of our reputation as the nation's leading legal advocates for official English.

I am happy to have the chance this morning to talk about why we joined the other distinguished plaintiffs in filing this suit challenging the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Policy Guidance issued pursuant to Executive Order 13166.

We are here for two basic reasons. First, because we believe Executive Order 13166 and its related policy guidance threatens the linguistic unity and well being of the United States. Second, we are here because we believe the order and its policy guidance threatens ProEnglish's existence as an organization.

Let me talk a little about the first point. Executive Order 13166 says that any recipient of federal funds who fails to provide translation or interpreter services for people who do not speak English may be guilty of violating their civil rights. In other words, if you get federal funds and use English to speak to someone who doesn't, you may have violated the law.

How did his happen? Well in August of 2000, without any authorization by Congress, a group of Clinton Administration lawyers under acting Assistant Attorney General Bill Lann Lee decided to reinterpret the civil rights law. Lee had a long history of legal advocacy for multilingual policies. So this group redefined the law in a way that forces every level of government to become a multilingual service provider. They then persuaded President Clinton to sign Executive Order 13166 codifying their new definition.

So at the stroke of a pen, the right of every government employee, agency, or federally funded entity to use English when communicating with a non-English speaking person was called into question. Suddenly, federally funded entities could not choose to communicate solely in English without fear of losing their federal funding, or fear of being hauled into court. In essence E.O. 13166 is official multilingualism disguised as civil rights enforcement.

We believe this undeclared policy of official multilingualism will be a disaster in a pluralistic nation like the United States. It will eliminate major incentives to learn English and foster the balkanization of our society along linguistic and cultural lines. That is dangerous. As California Berkley professor John Searle has noted, there is no successful multicultural country anywhere in the world today.

Moreover, the American people are diametrically opposed to multilingual government. Every time there has been an official English measure on a statewide ballot in the last twenty years, voters have approved it, most often by landslide proportions. As a result 26 states (as of May, 2007), 30 states) - a clear majority - now have English as their official language.

But E.O. 13166 is not just a mandate with respect to behavior, it is a mandate with respect to spending. The guidelines specify that that the cost of complying must be paid by the federal funds recipient alone. Full implementation of Executive Order 13166 is going to cost taxpayers and private citizens billions, if not tens of billions of dollars annually.

Now let me talk about why Executive Order 13166 threatens ProEnglish. As I said a fundamental part of our mission is to make English the official language at all levels of government. So we work to persuade legislators, officials and decision makers at the national, state and local levels to adopt English as the official language. We have been very successful in helping to persuade dozens of state and local governments to adopt English as their official language.

The E.O. 13166-directed guidelines have already had a negative impact on our work. Our efforts to promote official English laws are now routinely met with warnings that such declarations violate the law. The argument is made that the passage of such laws risks a cut-off of federal funding or costly discrimination lawsuits. Our attempts to explain that the guidelines have no legal authority are useless against the chilling effect of threatened federal sanctions and the government's massive public outreach campaign.

Barton County, Kansas, illustrates what I mean. The county passed an official English resolution on June 9, 1997. The resolution said that all official acts and records had to be conducted and printed in English. ProEnglish, through its members and activists, spent money, time, and effort to promote passage of the county's resolution.

But in the fall of 2002 the Barton County Minority Affairs Committee asked the County to rescind the official English resolution. The Committee made its request in the form of a statement on December 16, 2002 that specifically cited a predecessor organization that ProEnglish's directors were affiliated with, as well as one of ProEnglish's current directors by name. The statement also referred to Executive Order 13166. It said that Barton County receives $145 million in federal funds, and that "the portion of that revenue that goes to support programs is what we could lose by not complying with the 2000 federal law. . . .We know it could cost us millions of dollars in lost federal funds to actually enforce the resolution because we would be contradicting federal law. . . . In many instances, the resolution has already been trumped by the federal law, so concrete changes to our county's policies will be negligible. In the interpretation of our committee, we believe that the 2000 federal mandate leaves our 1997 resolution groundless as a policy."

The chilling effect of that statement was immediate. The Barton County Board of Commissioners voted to rescind its official English resolution the following day.

In other jurisdictions ProEnglish has faced the similar promotion of this illegitimate order, which has nullified or hindered us in the pursuit of our mission. The effect of the E.O. 13166 guidelines is to pit the apparent authority of the federal government against ProEnglish and its reason to exist as a public educational organization.

The order also has hurt our efforts to stop laws requiring multilingual government services. Governments are spending millions of dollars to provide multilingual services based on the unauthorized E.O. 13166 guidelines. For example District of Columbia Mayor Anthony Williams in a press release issued April 21, 2004, supporting passage of an ordinance requiring multi-lingual services in the District of Columbia, states that "…language is a civil rights issue..." So, ProEnglish's opposition to measures to provide multilingual services can be characterized as "opposing civil rights."
Finally the guidelines themselves claim to be a legitimate expression of anti-discrimination laws and claim to merely implement Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. This is false.

As a result of that assertion, however, ProEnglish and the positions it takes can be characterized, and as we saw in Barton County Kansas, are characterized in a negative light. This has hurt ProEnglish's reputation with policy makers it seeks to influence, as well as with potential donors.

The net result of these effects is to undermine ProEnglish rights to freedom of speech and free association. Instead of narrowly-tailoring its effect, the E.O. 113166 guidelines sweep broadly in an attempt to discredit and neutralize ProEnglish's public interest purpose. This is an attack on ProEnglish, its members, employees, supporters, and existence as an organization.

Thank you for your attention.

ProEnglish's press release
ProEnglish Chairman Bob Park's press statement
More about the EO13166/HHS lawsuit
Initial brief of the HHS Lawsuit, in HTML, .doc (Word), or .pdf (Acrobat)