Just what we need, perhaps — another court decision calculated to invite the Democrats to trench warfare with the Republicans.

On the other hand, the U. S. Supreme Court’s 6-3 stamp of approval this week on Indiana’s voter ID law is a rare kind of decision these days: one notable for sanity of outcome and clarity of diction.

All the court says, in Crawford vs. Marion Co. Election Board, is that a state can require voters to prove their identity.

There’s something wrong with proving your identity?  I used a credit card the other day in some context or the other, and the clerk asked to see my driver’s license.  

The experience made so little impression on me I can’t quite remember the venue. Had  I presented a just-written check, likely the clerk would have copied down the information on the back of the check. Big deal. So what?

Yet a New York Times editorial portrays the Indiana law — passed by Republicans, with nary a Democratic “yes” vote — as meant “to disenfranchise groups that lean Democratic.”

It’s the same curious reasoning that prevented the Texas Senate last year from passing a photo ID bill. Republicans were trying to disenfranchise Democrats — couldn’t we tell by watching?  

No, we couldn’t tell by watching. It looked for all the world like an attempt to bring to the electoral process a higher level of scrutiny, hence of trust in outcomes, especially hotly disputed outcomes.

But, hey, here was a chance for Democrats to shine in their courtship of lower-income voters, especially Hispanics. Why, those Republicans — grrrrr, just to think about made you furious — actually wanted only real voters to exercise the franchise! The nerve!  The effrontery!

It was quite a show the Democrats put on, crowned with the success that high political drama often enjoys. The Democrats actually had one argument that wasn’t an insult to normal intelligence: to wit, which the “fake voter” problem wasn’t in reality a very large problem — to date. Why the state couldn’t anticipate and try to foreclose the appearance of such a problem was a question that never found a plausible answer. It was plain to all who opposed it that the photo ID bill was a naked attempt to scare off perfectly eligible, non-Republican voters.

Significantly, Indiana’s photo ID law won approval not only from court conservatives but also from swing man Anthony Kennedy and the court’s most liberal justice, John Paul Stevens. The latter could find no “concrete evidence of the burden imposed on voters” lacking photo ID.

Indeed the Indiana statute provides outs and bypasses for such voters. No driver’s license?  A current passport or a birth certificate will suffice.  

Got neither on hand?  The law provides for a provisional vote in that case. The voter may return within 10 days to show the proof that was missing on election day.

 Too poor, still, to have a birth certificate?  The voter may swear indigence.  Or he may plead, also on his oath, religious scruples against photos.

What more should Indiana do to make sure the voter is who he says he is?  Run a taxpayer-financed DNA check?

Photo ID laws in the handful of states that now have them, and the much larger number that will surely consider them, the Supreme Court having lighted the way, have to do with growing concerns over the fast-growing presence among us of undocumented aliens.

The desire to prevent crooked politicians (a type without partisan identity) from stuffing ballot boxes with the votes of non-citizens can hardly be called racist or unreasonable. Except by those more concerned with outcome than process.

The franchise, as everyone acknowledges, is a safeguard of liberty. Wouldn’t you suppose that was reason enough to protect its integrity?  Long gone are the days we reserved the vote for the supposedly best and brightest.

Pretty much everyone nowadays votes, or at least enjoys the entitlement. That particular politicians won’t accede to calls for the bare-minimum policing of voter rolls isn’t an agreeable fact to digest.

That the nation’s highest court will accede is better than agreeable, it’s cause for the champagne bucket. Let’s celebrate enjoy common sense in government every rare opportunity we get.

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