There are some rich ironies in a recent Stewart Baker blog post touting the slow crawl toward REAL ID compliance he believes states are making. One of the choicest is that his cheerleading for a national ID appears under a Hoover Institution banner that says “ADVANCING A FREE SOCIETY.”
No, having a national ID would not advance a free society. You could say “ADVANCING A SECURE SOCIETY” but even then you’d be overstating the case. A national ID would reduce the security of individuals massively in the aggregate in exchange for modest and arguable state security gains.
Speaking of which, Baker posts a picture of Mohammed Atta’s Florida driver’s license in his post. The implication is that having a national ID would have prevented the 9/11 attacks. In fact, having a national ID would have caused a mild inconvenience to the 9/11 attackers. Billions of dollars spent, massive aggregate inconvenience to law‐abiding American citizens, and a much‐more‐powerful federal government so that terrorists could be mildly inconvenienced?
One of the greatest ironies is that Baker doesn’t—as he never has—takes on the merits of how and how well a national ID would advance security goals. But the merits don’t matter. Baker’s post provides a nice reminder that the bureaucrats will use their big‐government allies to restart their moribund national ID plans if they can. Despite massive public opposition to REAL ID, they’ll try to build it anyway.
An anti‐immigration group recently issued a report saying that states are getting on board with REAL ID. (They’re meeting massively reduced REAL ID “milestones” coincidentally, not to meet federal demands.) National ID advocate Jim Sensenbrenner (R‑WI) put on a lop‐sided show‐hearing in the House Judiciary Committee last week, hoping to prop up REAL ID’s decaying body.
As if anyone would believe it, a DHS official said at the hearing that the January 2013 deadline for state compliance would not be extended. Book your tickets now, because there won’t be a damn thing different on the airport come January. The Department of Homeland hasn’t stood by any of its deadlines for REAL ID compliance. If it did, by refusing IDs from non‐compliant states at the airport, the public outcry would be so large that REAL ID would be repealed within the week.
REAL ID will never be implemented. That doesn’t stop the federal government from spending money on it, so the bureaucrats keep trying to corral you into their national ID. They get occassional help, and sometimes it even travels under the false flag of “ADVANCING A FREE SOCIETY.”
