Gov. Spitzer's Latest Awkward Pirouette In His Spastic "Dance Of a Million Mostly Democratic Illegal Votes"

Homeland Security has offered Spitzer a compromise plan that allows him to save a bit of face in his impressively brainless campaign to equip up to one million illegal aliens with valid New York licenses.

Basically, the plan calls for a two, or really a three-track drivers license program in New York: one for illegal immigrants or others who simply don’t want the other licenses which will cost a bit more; and another that will let citizens cross the Canadian border without a passport (that will soon be a requirement).

Thirdly drivers can choose to get a federally-approved Real ID license that will let them board airplanes and enter federal buildings without presenting a passport or other proof of citizenship.

Bryan addresses why, in spite of the superficial defanging the compromise seems to offer, the brainlessness remains impressive.

That’s a strange compromise. The first evidently means that NY drivers licenses will no longer be accepted as ID for boarding planes and the like. Spitzer has in effect destroyed NY drivers licenses as valid ID. That “extra cost” line means that US citizens will pay more for their Real ID drivers licences than illegal aliens will in the state of New York if they want to be able to use those licenses for ID purposes other than driving, as they routinely have up to now.

Having to pay more than illegal aliens so that you can maintain the same services you already had is going to make citizens happy? I don’t think so.

This is just like the DREAM Act, which would grant in-state tuition benefits to illegals, in effect giving them a cost break that citizens who live outside a given state can’t get. So once again, the government is making the up front costs of citizenship outweigh the up front costs of breaking the law.

Ace flips ahead in the playbill for a preview of the next act.

Yes, the fact that NY licensees were being devalued as ID for things like getting on an airplane was part of the outcry but at the heart was the very idea of providing legal instruments to illegal immigrants. This plan doesn't address that except it will cost more for citizens to get a service they already get while illegals pay the current lower price. How exactly is that going to make people less angry?

How long until some 'immigrants rights' group complains that illegals are being treated as 'second class citizens'?

We already know that asking to see any kind of ID at polling places is racist.  So it doesn't so much matter if "undocumented" (an increasingly laughable misnomer) immigrants are carrying New York license version 1, 2, or 3, and/or a Real ID. 

The extension of additional citizen privileges (at sub-citizen prices) to illegal aliens is more significant as a spoony sashay toward de facto full citizenship under the false guise of  pragmatism than strictly as a documentation matter.  Once the distinctions in citizenship become as blurred (and as shockingly racist, classist, and generally undignified) as "version 1-documented" vs. "version 2-documented", we should finally be ready to take that bold leap of looking the other way as we beckon non-citizens to begin voting en masse.