After the second of several challenges failed in court this week, the state of New York will begin offering driver’s licenses to illegal aliens on Monday. This dream of the woke crowd in New York City is being delivered by Governor Andrew Cuomo and a closely divided state legislature in Albany. The potential problems this will cause (and has already caused in other states) are being ignored, as is the majority opinion of the voters. (The Hill)

A federal judge on Friday denied a challenge to a law that will allow New York to give driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

The law, which is set to go into effect next week, was facing its second challenge in court, the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reports.

U.S. District Judge Gary Sharpe ruled against Rensselaer County Clerk Frank Merola, saying he lacked the legal capacity to bring the lawsuit against the state over the new law.

This may not be the end of the road in terms of getting this law off the books. The case on Friday was not decided by the judge on the merits of the law in question. It was a procedural failure, wherein it was determined that the county clerk who brought the challenge lacked the standing to do so. Two other challenges are making their way through the system now, so it’s possible an injunction will still be delivered.

Fourteen other states, plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico already have laws on the books allowing illegals to obtain a license. The issue has never made it to the Supreme Court. The way New York’s law sneaks this through is the same as was done in California. They’re removing the requirement to provide a Social Security number when applying. That means the New York license won’t be REAL ID-compliant, but it will allow you to drive and act as proof of age.

What’s really amazing is the chutzpah on display by the legislature here. Activists have been trying to get one variation or another of this law on the books since 2001. It’s always been defeated or withdrawn. The reason it’s failed is that residents of the state do not support the idea. Even the most recent polling shows that a majority of New Yorkers oppose giving licenses to illegals by a double-digit margin. And yet the legislators plowed ahead with it anyway.

Perhaps that should serve as a lesson to the voters. They keep electing the same liberal Democrats over and over again and they are ignored on important matters when those representatives show up for work. I suppose they’re getting what they deserve now.

And what they’ll get will be a mixed bag at best. As we’ve already seen in other states, wherever you have a Motor Voter system in place, mistakes creep into the process. It’s a virtual certainty that illegal aliens will show up on the voter rolls when this system kicks into gear. And even if we ignore the technical glitches, this remains the wrong thing to do in principle. It isn’t the state’s job to make life easier for illegal aliens. Unless the immigration laws are changed, it’s their job to work to get them out of the country, not turn them loose to further clog up the traffic in the five boroughs.

But hey, that’s life in New York for you. Meanwhile, we continue to see an exodus of working-class people heading out to live in other, lower-tax, less-regulated states. And after the census next year the Empire State will most likely lose another seat in Congress, further diminishing its relevance.