Feds to blame for Eliot Spitzer's license turnaround
Wednesday, October 31st 2007, 4:00 AM

Juan Gonzalez

Behind-the-scenes pressure from the Bush administration prompted Gov. Spitzer's stunning decision last weekend to split his baby into three.

The "baby" in this case was the governor's controversial plan to permit undocumented immigrants to apply for the same driver's license as other New Yorkers.

Spitzer had insisted for weeks that he was moving ahead with his plan despite a firestorm of opposition because he believed it was the right thing to do.

Then last Wednesday, the governor convened an impromptu meeting of his top staff in Albany. It came after two days of rancorous debate in both the Senate and Assembly on the license issue.

With Republicans pounding the governor, several panicked members of Spitzer's staff warned him "we were getting hosed on this issue," said a source close to the governor.

Then on Thursday, Mike Balboni, Spitzer's deputy secretary for public safety, and Motor Vehicles Commissioner David Swarts flew to Washington to meet with federal homeland security officials over the license policy.

Balboni wanted to discuss with the feds a new enhanced license the federal government was asking states to adopt to allow American citizens living near Canada and Mexico to use while crossing back and forth across the border.

Balboni, the former Republican state senator from Long Island, had also been told that federal homeland security officials were on the verge of publicly criticizing Spitzer's new license policy.

"They were ready to say it was a threat to national security," said one Spitzer official. "That would have undermined our whole effort."

Given the climate these days, all the federal government has to do is yell "national security" and any kind of debate is automatically cut off.

A federal condemnation would have been fatal to Spitzer's hope of providing some way for the state's 1million undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows.

The governor had something huge that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff badly needed.

The Bush administration is bent on creating a new form of high-tech national identity card, known as Real ID. A Republican-controlled Congress tacked the Real ID Act onto an Iraq war funding bill in 2005. It would link the databases of every state motor vehicle department in the country.

Real ID has created a host of privacy-rights and identity-theft issues and the billions of dollars needed to implement it would have to be paid for by the separate states. Citizen groups from both the left and the right have opposed the new law. More than a dozen states have refused to adopt it.

Quite simply, Real ID was on the verge of collapse.

The Bush administration desperately needed one big state to come onboard - and Spitzer needed some way to save his new driver's license policy.

By early Friday morning, Balboni had cut the deal with Chertoff. The federal government would certify that Spitzer's plan to join Real ID was creating the most secure license in the country.

Meanwhile, Spitzer got to announce that the baby he had just sliced in three was still alive.

Instead of one New York State license available to everyone, the Spitzer reversal now proposes three different types of licenses:

The first will meet federal Real ID standards and can be used to board airplanes and enter federal buildings.

The second "enhanced" license can be used to cross the Canadian border.

The third state driver's license will enable a person to drive in New York State but will not be valid for federal identification purposes.

Immigrant advocates are furious over Spitzer's sudden reversal.

"They came to us months ago with a two-tier proposal and we told them it would be a scarlet letter that no undocumented would want to have," said Chung-Wha Hong, director of the New York Immigration Coalition. "We thought they had agreed with us. This is a betrayal of the governor's policy and his own beliefs."
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/2007/10 ... nse-1.html