NY Gov scraps heated immigrant driver license plan

New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, center, walks with fellow Democatic New Yorkers Rep. Nita Lowey, l, and Rep. Carolyn Maloney, r, to a drivers-license news conference on Capitol Hill. Wednesday, Nov. 15, 2007 (AP Photos/Susan Walsh)

by Glenn Thrush, Carol Eisenberg and James Madore

A humbled New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer — facing a near-insurrection from New York Democrats — is ditching his controversial plan to grant drivers’ licenses to illegal immigrants that provoked a massive national backlash.

Spitzer will announce he’s “scrapping the plan” after a meeting of the state’s congressional delegation on Capitol Hill this morning, according to his spokeswoman, Christine Anderson.

The license proposal had proven to be a political albatross for Democratic supporters, especially Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who was grilled on the issue during a debate in Philadelphia late last month.

Democrats and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had pressured the governor to drop the proposal, which garnered the support of only one-third of New Yorkers, according to polls.

“The heat was rising on Eliot, and he reacted,” said one Spitzer ally, among a handful of Democrats the governor reached out to last night

Spitzer is expected to tell the delegation that “immigration is a federal, not a state issue,” said one congressional source familiar with the governor’s thinking.

That explanation is virtually identical to Clinton’s statements on the issue — and gives the Democratic frontrunner a ready-made answer when the topic is inevitably raised at tomorrow’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas.

Clinton was among the first elected officials to be told of Spitzer’s switch, according to Democratic sources.

“I am not willing to fight to the bitter end on something that will not ultimately be implemented,” Spitzer said in an interview last night with the New York Times. “I thought we had a principled decision, and it’s not necessarily easy to back away from trying to move a debate forward.”
Critics portrayed his defeat as inevitable.

“This plan was wrong from the start and it’s right that he’s putting behind him,” said Rep. Peter King (R-Seaford) who opposed the proposal. “He’s seen the impact on Hilary Clinton’s campaign and Democrats from around the state just wanted to free themselves from this issue.”

Added another opponent, state Sen. John Flanagan (R- East Northport): “The governor’s idea from the beginning was illegal, inappropriate and ill advised. He completely ignored the public, ignored the legislature, ignored the opinions of many, many people throughout the state of New York.”

Clinton won’t attend today’s delegation meeting and isn’t planning to meet with the governor privately, although she will be in Washington all day, her staff said. Sen. Charles Schumer will attend the meeting, according to his aides.

Spitzer dialed back the plan three weeks ago after being savaged for proposing a license critics argued might help terrorists and criminals get identification.

Under the original plan, illegal immigrants would have been eligible for the same licenses available to other New Yorkers. But after intense negotiations with the Department of Homeland Security, Spitzer announced Oct. 27 that illegal immigrants would only be eligible for a “third-tier” license that would be marked as unusable for federal identification purposes, such as boarding a plane.

That decision was seen as a betrayal by immigrant advocates and some of Spitzer’s most ardent supporters, but did little to pacify his critics. Speaking in Puerto Rico last week, the governor gave the first hints that he might abandon the effort altogether, refusing to rule out shelving the plan.

Public opinion was firmly stacked against him: Two-thirds of registered voters in New York opposed the plan — and only a quarter say they would vote for Spitzer again, according to a Siena Research Institute poll released yesterday.

Republicans rushed to capitalize on the Democrats’ perceived vulnerability on the issue. A proposal introduced yesterday by Rep. Vito Fossella (R-Staten Island), would withhold highway funding for any state that granted licenses to illegals, or in other ways failed to comply with new federal requirements to tighten the security of licenses.

King, one of the most vocal critics of illegal immigration in Congress, co-sponsored Fossella’s bill and authored another piece of legislation last week to prohibit the issuance of drivers’ licenses to people without social security numbers.

On Long Island late last night, Rev. Allan Ramirez of the Brookville Reformed Church said that Spitzer did the right thing in abandoning the plan that had come to fuel anti-immigrant rhetoric.

“I think he was right in pulling his support for this program because it was becoming fodder for political bigots who were using it to divide the immigrant community,” he said. “I for one within the immigrant community say we will not allow these bigots to use the immigrant community as a political pinata and that’s what this had become. This is ultimately a national issue that needs to be addressed on a federal level.”

Representatives of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Nassau and Suffolk county executives Tom Suozzi and Steve Levy could not be reached for comment.

Melissa Mansfield and Zachary Dowdy contributed to this report for Newsday, a Tribune Co. newspaper.