Last week, I talked about the new passport requirements for Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans traveling across our northern and southern borders. Gave the plan a thumbs-up and highlighted the continued lapses in Canada’s passport screening office. Imposing this reasonable security measure on short-term visitors would put needed pressure on both our neighbors to shore up their ID validation systems.

Now, President Bush is backtracking on the regulations. Regulations that he put into law when he put his signature on last year’s so-called intelligence reform bill. Even worse, Bush publicized his total cluelessness about the rules at a newspaper editors’ conference here in Washington:

President Bush expressed dismay yesterday over plans to require American, Canadian and Mexican citizens to show passports to enter the United States — a requirement of an intelligence-reform bill he signed late last year — saying it could “disrupt the honest flow of traffic.”

“When I first read that in the newspaper, about the need to have passports, for particularly the day crossings that take place — about a million, for example in the state of Texas — I said, ‘What’s going on here?”‘ Bush told the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

What’s going on here is Bush pandering to the Chamber of Commerce crowd, the tourism industry, and the open-borders lobbyists who still feel entitled to unfettered travel in and out of the U.S. Having to show a passport is not a civil liberties catastrophe. It’s a nuisance, not a nightmare. Would have been nice to have a president with enough of a clue and a backbone to say so.

More: Bryan Preston at The Immigration Blog is on the same wavelength.