In several states around the country, legislators are working to pass legislation that would move their states toward compliance with the REAL ID Act, the U.S. national ID law. Oklahoma state senator David Holt (R), for example, has touted his plan as giving Oklahomans the “liberty” to choose which of two ID types they’ll get. Either one feeds their data into a nationwide system of databases.
If you want a sense of what these legislators are getting their states into, take a look at the eight‐page notice the Department of Homeland Security published in the Federal Register today. It’s an entirely ordinary bureaucratic document, which walks through the processes states have to go through to certify themselves as compliant. Its few pages represent hundreds of hours of paperwork that state employees will have to put in complying with federal mandates.
Among them is the requirement that the top official of the DMV and the state Attorney General confirm that their state jumps through all the hoops in federal law. Maybe Oklahoma’s Attorney General, Scott Pruitt (R), thinks his office’s time is well spent on pushing paper for the federal government, but it’s more likely that he wants to be enforcing Oklahoma laws that protect Oklahomans.
REAL ID‐compliant states have to recertify to the DHS every three years that they meet DHS’s standards. DHS can and will change these standards, of course. DHS officials get to inspect state facilities and interview state employees and contractors. DHS can issue corrective demands and require the states to follow them before recertification.
It’s all unremarkable—if you’re sanguine about taxpayer dollars burned on bureaucracy, and if you think that states are just administrative arms of the federal government. But if you think of states as constitutionally independent sovereigns, you recognize that this document is out of whack. States do not exist to play second fiddle in bureaucrat‐on‐bureaucrat bureaucracy.
Whether or not we have a national ID matters. The constitutional design of government matters, including, one hopes, to people in Oklahoma and other states across that land. State officials who are conscious of these things should reject this paperwork and these mandates. If the federal government wants a national ID, the federal government should implement it itself.
