What's Right

National Review, Sept 29, 2003 by David Frum

License

Imagine for a moment that you are a terrorist. You have just infiltrated the United States and are hiding out in Los Angeles. What's the first thing you need now?

Judging by the actual behavior of the last bunch of terrorists to pass through the United States, you might think the answer is: "a lap-dance from a Las Vegas showgirl." But before you can enjoy the Great Satan's devilish pleasures, there is something you need first: You need a new name and identity that allow you to hide from the Great Satan's alert police.

And thanks to California governor Gray Davis, what you need is now available without fuss, trouble, or very much in the way of expense.

On September 5, barely a month before the California recall election, Davis signed a law to help illegal immigrants obtain California driver's licenses. California will no longer require proof of citizenship -- such as a U.S. passport -- from applicants for licenses. Instead, all you will need is the bogus passport with which you entered the United States in the first place, plus a federal Taxpayer ID (available to anyone who asks for it), plus a canceled rent check or utility bill.

If you can get those things and then pass a driver's test, you too may have a California ID, with which you can board planes, enter the State or Defense Department, obtain a credit card and one hundred other useful things as well.

It's the driver's license, for example, that is used to identify people for the background checks required of gun buyers. Bogus license equals bogus identity -- neatly circumventing the gun rules that constrain actual American citizens.

True, the California driver's license requires fingerprints -- but that's no special problem: The state won't share the information from those prints with the Immigration Service, so even if your prints show up on a federal watch-list, California will never tell on you.

From your point of view, all of this is astounding luck -- especially astounding because Davis himself vetoed a nearly identical law just twelve months ago. "The tragedy of September 11," Governor Davis explained in September 2002, "made it abundantly clear that the driver's license is more than just a license to drive; it is one of the primary documents we use to identify ourselves. Unfortunately, a driver's license was in the hands of terrorists who attacked America on that fateful day."

Davis was right. The 9/11 hijackers took advantage of lax laws in Virginia to license themselves in that state. In the weeks leading up to 9/11, the future hijackers kept being pulled over for their poor driving -- one of them on the very day before the attack -- but the cops who looked at their licenses never noticed anything suspicious.

You'd think it would now be a top priority to make driver's licenses more effective and reliable. Yet Davis is doing exactly the opposite -- making them more vulnerable to fraud, not less.

Our hypothetical terrorist may not much care why Davis changed his mind. Yet if you allowed yourself to read the American papers, you'd discover some clues about this Governor Davis's real intentions.

Davis's opponents keep blaming his flip-flop on his eagerness for Hispanic votes. On the surface this makes little sense: After all, those Hispanics legally eligible to vote are citizens, and therefore already entitled to a license.

But then again, in modern America, you no longer have to be legally eligible in order to cast a ballot. The Clinton administration's "Motor Voter" Act of 1993 requires voter-registration applications to be given to everyone who applies for a driver's license. Applicants are supposed to attest on a form that they are indeed citizens, but they are seldom asked for proof. By getting hundreds of thousands of alien drivers to the Department of Motor Vehicles by October 7, Davis may hope that some thousands of them may erroneously or mischievously register to vote -- for him, of course.

Since Motor Voter became law, non-citizen voters have changed the outcome of dozens of state and local elections, where turnouts are typically low; and nobody is expecting the recall vote in California to be very high.

Through this recall election, Gray Davis has again and again warned Californians of the dangers of electing political novices. Experience, he reminds audiences, counts in government just as much as it does in anything else -- say, impersonating killer robots in multi-million- dollar action extravaganzas. And maybe he has a point. But experience can be just as useful to those who wish to game the system as to those who intend to serve it -- and there's every reason to fear that in California, the system is being gamed.

Along the way to recall, Davis manipulated California's electrical energy and its budget for his own partisan ends. There's no reason not to expect him to do it again -- he is doing it again! So, suspicious of Schwarzenegger as every principled conservative has to be, so long as this trickster is on the ballot, even the most dour skeptic has to join him in saying to the Old Guard in California politics: Hasta la vista, baby.