In last night’s Democrat debate, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton discussed their positions on driver’s licenses for illegal aliens.  Clinton offered perhaps the most bizarre rationale for her opposition (for now, anyway) to letting illegal aliens have a license, saying:

“I do not think that it is either appropriate to give a driver's license to someone who is here undocumented, putting them, frankly, at risk, because that is clear evidence that they are not here legally.”

I’ve been trying to make sense of this since I first heard it.  It appears she is saying that she opposes letting illegal aliens get licenses for their own good, so they can avoid detection and deportation.

We all know that HRC needs Hispanic votes to win in California and that her position against driver’s licenses might hurt her with that constituency, so maybe she was looking for a way to soften the blow.  If that is the case and her statement of last night has been deciphered correctly, it takes pandering to a whole new level. 

HRC also said she’s against the “demagoguery and mean-spiritedness” of the illegal immigration debate, which we here at Freedom’s Watch found amusing given her past statements on the issue.  This is from a July 13, 2005 New York Times story, “The Evolution of Hillary Clinton:”

Republicans have made much of a radio interview Mrs. Clinton gave to WABC in 2003, in which she declared, "I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants." She called for a comprehensive system to track these immigrants, some form of entry and exit identification and tighter border controls, and she reluctantly suggested that an identification system for citizens might be needed.

"People have to stop employing illegal immigrants," she said in the 2003 interview. "I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau Counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx - you're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”

By its very nature, “evolution” is a never-ending process.  So it is with Hillary Clinton – ardent foe of illegal immigrats one day, protector of illegal immigrants the next.  Who knows what tomorrow will bring?

For his part, Barack Obama stuck to his guns on wanting to give driver’s licenses to illegal aliens, saying it was a matter of “public safety.”  Really?

A driver’s license is a so-called “breeder document” that illegal aliens can use to obtain other documents and benefits, like opening bank accounts, registering to vote, getting public benefits, and… boarding an airplane.  How can “public safety” be advanced by making it easier for illegal aliens that we know next to nothing about to board airplanes?  In the October 12, 2007 New York Observer, Rep. John Hall (D-NY) hit the nail on the head when he was asked about Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s plan to give licenses to illegal aliens:

"I'm concerned with what kind of security measures will be in place to ensure that people receiving licenses are who they say they are and that it won't be used as a breeder document to secure more documentation. My wife was assistant state attorney general in Tennessee when they did the same thing and their experience in Tennessee was that more undocumented immigrants came to the state specifically because they knew they could receive a driver's license where they couldn't in other states. So, it does increase the traffic in the states that choose to do this."

A driver’s license is the closest thing we have to a national ID card.  Congress enacted the Real ID legislation (with the votes of both HRC and Obama, by the way) because it understood that in a post-9/11 world, if a driver’s license is required to board an airplane we had better make sure that the person on the license is who they say they are.   Barack Obama apparently wants to change all that. 

Last night’s display illustrates again that Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are more concerned with pandering to political constituencies than protecting national security.