NORWICH – It wasn’t what Governor Eliot Spitzer is calling the “hyper-partisanship” of American politics that forced him to abandon his illegal immigrant driver’s license plan, says Senator Tom Libous (R-Binghamton).

Libous claims the license plan was dropped for the exact opposite reason – because it doesn’t have enough support from Democrats, let alone Republicans.

According to a recent Siena College poll, an overwhelming number of New Yorkers aren’t in favor of it, either.

“I never seen an issue cut across party lines with no support such as this one,” the chair of the state Senate’s Transportation Committee said Wednesday.

Spitzer was proposing to allow state residents without Social Security numbers to be eligible for licenses. They would have to provie 14 proofs of identitity, and undergo stricter background checks.

The proposal was part of a three-tier plan to comply with upcoming identification upgrades that will require all U.S. residents to have federally approved I.D.’s to board planes, cross borders in North America and enter government buildings.

Rather than judge the plan on its merits, Spitzer claims Republicans derailed it in favor of partisanship and “preyed on the public’s worst fears” by portraying the license plan as a open door policy for terrorists.

“While people of good faith opposed my plan for fair reasons, some partisans unleashed a response that has become all too familiar in American politics,” Spitzer said Wednesday in Washington. “Political opponents equated minimum-wage, undocumented dishwashers with Osama Bin Laden. Newspaper headlines equated a drivers’ license for an undocumented migrant laborers with a ‘Passport to Terror’ and a ‘License to Kill.’ Based on the New Yorkers I speak to each and every day, I feel confident in saying that this rhetoric is wildly out of step with mainstream values – doing nothing to offer solutions and everything to exploit fear.”