California Senator Gil Cedillo, the champion of the current efforts to allow illegal aliens to paper over their illegality with driver licenses, is rebuffing Gov. Schwarzenegger’s demands (hat tip: Joel Buckingham) that any licenses issued to illegal aliens clearly state that the holder is not a lawful resident of California. [If this idea sounds familiar to regular readers of this blog, it should.] According to Cedillo’s rhetoric, last year’s repealed bill, SB 60, and this year’s SB 1160, are/were “all about public safety,” not an underhanded attempt to subvert U.S. immigration law by helping undocumented illegal aliens become documented illegal aliens. Schwarzenegger’s proposal would do one better for public safety, by further documenting the illegals as illegals, thereby ensuring that driver licenses are not used for any purpose other than, well, driving.

Gilly doesn’t like that. After all, what self-respecting illegal alien will show up to vote for him illegally if his license has “hey, everybody, I’m an illegal alien” stamped all over it? Granted, you don’t have to show an ID, real or fake, to vote in California, but most illegals don’t know that. Hell, you can barely get them to memorize one or two names like “John Kerry” or “Gil Cedillo” long enough to get them to vote your preference. Expecting them to also remember that their clearly marked California Illegal Alien Driver License doesn’t prevent them from voting illegally is just too much to ask.

Cedillo said he would rather abandon his driver’s license bill, SB 1160, than allow illegal residents to be unfairly singled out for “that type of societal, institutional, structured discrimination.”

He said he suspects the governor is proposing the license markings as a trial balloon rather than to kill negotiations.

“But if he’s trying to put in a poison pill, that would be it,” Cedillo said.

O-kay. Not sure I understand why it’s any less “discriminatory” to deny licenses to people who aren’t supposed to be here than it is to grant licenses to people who aren’t supposed to be here, but mark these licenses so as not to obscure the fact that they aren’t supposed to be here. If I really believed that crap about public safety, I’d be demanding the Schwarzenegger version of the bill. Since I don’t, I’m very much at peace with the possibility that our Legislature and our Governor may never agree as to what is or isn’t an acceptable proposal for licensing illegals.

For all his faults, however, Cedillo does step short of violating Godwin’s Law. That’s more than I can say about Francisco Estrada, the policy director of the Mexican American Legal “Defense” and “Educational” Fund, who had this to say of the Schwarzenegger proposal:

“They might as well be branded on the forehead.”

Border controls, mass genocide, what’s the diff?