Real ID: The States Push Back

Last year Congress snuck a piece of legislation through by cunningly attaching it to an Iraq War spending bill. This maneuver forestalled any meaningful debate or even any publicity until after the fact. The Real ID bill orders states to have in place a system for making certain that only real Americans (or legal residents) are allowed drivers' licenses or other official state identification cards. Also included in the bill is the requirement that states set up data bases on their citizens that can be accessed by other states and, presumably, the federal government. What Congress neglected to do in this egregious bit of legislation was to fund the requirement. This screw-up finally might be the reason states decide not to cooperate with the regime. From the NY Times:

Reacting to the Sept. 11 attacks, Congress passed the Real ID law last year, intending to make it tougher for terrorists to obtain driver's licenses and for people without proper identification to board planes or enter federal buildings.

But with the deadline for setting up the law two years away, states are frustrated.

They say the law — which requires states to use sources like birth certificates and national immigration databases to verify that people applying for or renewing driver's licenses are American citizens or legal residents — will be too expensive and difficult to put in place by the May 2008 deadline. Another issue is the privacy impact of the requirement that states share, through databases, the personal information needed for a driver's license.

...Many states raised objections before the law was enacted, and some say there was too little debate about the law, which was attached to a large Iraq spending bill. [Emphasis added]

The federal government clearly intends the Real ID system to serve as a form of federal identification until the regime can finally ram through the Real Real ID, a national document that we will all have to carry all the time. Linked to that card will be all of the information that government can gather on us. Think "papers" a la the 1930s and '40s in Germany.

It's been nearly five years since 9/11. It's about time that we acted like grown-ups and moved on instead of constantly wallowing in fear and grief.

And in November it will be time to elect a Congress that will have the spine to tell the Emperor and his minions to go commit an unnatural act upon themselves whenever they come up with these kinds of dangerous plans.