Loading ...Real ID. The words have a discordant ring. They have a nasty taste to them and a foul aroma about them. They conjure up images of Big Brother’s Police State. They are an abomination created for a science fiction novel. An accurate thesaurus would list “freedom lost” as a synonym for them.
The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver’s licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver’s licenses will be issued and what information they must contain.
The cards would be mandatory for all “federal purposes,” which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don’t comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.
Although no one asked me, I find the practice of “tacking little extras” onto bills that quite possibly need to be passed reprehensible beyond words. Nonetheless, our spineless legislators, in all of their august wisdom, did resoundingly pass the bill.
You can tar and feather me as an radical, but I’ll be damned if I understand for even a moment why I need any kind of freakin’ ID to board a domestic flight, walk into a federal building, or visit a national park. I will grant that I can’t think of one conceivable reason for me to want to visit a nuclear facility, so I’m not going to fuss over that one. The last time I checked, I was an American citizen; bred, born, and reared. With that citizenship comes the right to go anywhere I want to go within the country without impediment. That’s the way it has always been.
Chertoff said the Real ID program is essential to national security because there are presently 8,000 types of identification accepted to enter the United States.
“It is simply unreasonable to expect our border inspectors to be able to detect forgeries on documents that range from baptismal certificates from small towns in Texas to cards that purport to reflect citizenship privileges in a province somewhere in Canada,” he said.
Ah, Mr. Chertoff, excuse me, please. What in the hell does someone coming into this country from another country have to do with Real ID for every American citizen? Last time I checked, y’all passed a law making it mandatory to have a passport for travel form one country to another – including Canada and Mexico. Those are the countries just to the north and south of us – NAFTA trading partners, I do believe. Now if Americans need a passport to travel out of the country, and visitors coming into this country need a passport to get in, what is the real story here? What I’m hearing sounds like so much hyperbole. Hyperbole, that is the polite way of saying, “ bullshit.”
Chertoff said there would be repercussions for states choosing not to comply.
“This is not a mandate,” Chertoff said. “A state doesn’t have to do this, but if the state doesn’t have — at the end of the day, at the end of the deadline — Real ID-compliant licenses then the state cannot expect that those licenses will be accepted for federal purposes.”
It isn’t a mandate, but there will be consequences. Don’t you just love it? You don’t have to do it, but if you don’t ,we are pretty much telling you that you aren’t an American and you’re not going to access what is yours by right of birth.
Folks, we best be waking up. We’re way up that proverbial creek without a paddle and the boat is filling up with … hyperbole. These folks in Washington aren’t chipping away at our rights and freedoms with a broad ax anymore. They are using bulldozers.
It is Friday, August 17, 2007 and that is what I think. Where do you stand? Do you agree with them? Do they scare the hell out of you? I truly want to know what you think!
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Thank you to our good friend Kyle of Comments From Left Field for linking in
Report From Hell: Topside » Comments From Left Field // Aug 17, 2007 at 8:56 PM
[...] for your Real ID cards,” Satan informed him. “R&D developed these, they’re great. You can spy on [...]
I’m a conservative (read: “conservative” not “Republican”), and I find the Real ID act to be a frightening and Orwellian concept.
How long until we need such identification to go from one state to another on the highways? That would seem to be the next logical step the government will be taking.
Vic: where are your papers, Sir?
Vic: Unfortunately I share your nightmare. This isn’t about republican vs democrat or conservative vs liberal. It is about Americans – Free Americans. I fear the last breath of freedom in our once great nation has been exhaled. Free Americans have gone from the endangered species list to the extinct list. Somewhere along the way a Faustian deal with the devil was made and the devil always wins.
GTL: My preferred paper, at least this week, is CHARMIN.