When the REAL ID Act passed in 2005, Senator Joe Lieberman (D‑CT), no civil libertarian, called the national ID law “unworkable” for good reason. It seeks to herd all Americans into a national ID system by coercing states into issuing drivers licenses (and sharing information about their drivers) according to complex federal standards.
The hook REAL ID uses in seeking to dragoon states into compliance is the threat that TSA agents will refuse IDs from non-complying states at our nation’s airports. The threat is an empty one. Consistently over years, every time a DHS-created compliance deadline has come around, state leaders with spines have backed the Department of Homeland Security down. I detailed the years-long saga of pushed-back deadlines last year in the Cato Policy Analysis, “REAL ID: A State-by-State Update.”
DHS has stopped publishing deadline changes in the Federal Register–perhaps the endless retreats were getting embarrassing–and now it has simply said on its website that TSA enforcement will begin sometime in 2016. But it’s evidently back-channeling threats to state officials. Those folks–unaware that REAL ID doesn’t work, and disinterested in the allocation of state and federal power–are lobbying their state legislatures to get on board with the national ID program.