Robert Dreyfuss is a freelance writer based in Alexandria, Va., who specializes in politics and national security issues. He is a contributing editor at The Nation, a contributing writer at Mother Jones, a senior correspondent for The American Prospect, and a frequent contributor to Rolling Stone.
In the wake of 9/11, a renewed push was launched for a bad, old idea: a national ID card. The Big Brother-style idea, scary to most Americans, was repeatedly rejected in the past, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, and polls show that it isn’t favored now. Led by Newt Gingrich and other authoritarian personalities, including Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who offered free software—there was an overt effort after 9/11 to enact it into law, but it died when it became clear that enthusiasm in Congress was lacking. Since then, backers reverted to a sly campaign to establish a “back door” national ID system, building on the idea of a single, national database of drivers licenses. In 2004, the chief sponsor of the latest effort, Rep. F. James Sensenbrenner, R.-Wis., tried to include it in last year’s intelligence bill—but he failed then, too.
That latest scheme is the so-called “REAL ID” Act, stealthily attached to the $82 billion war funding bill approved by the House last week and now in the Senate. The Democrats are aware that filibustering a defense bill isn’t likely to happen, so stopping the REAL ID this time seems to depend on whether a handful of Republican senators opposed to the idea can convince Senate leaders not to include it. Their chances don’t look good, even though the list of list of organizations opposed to the “REAL ID” Act is literally too long to cite: More than 600 groups have announced their opposition, from the ACLU to the National Governors Association and the National Conference of State Legislators to scores of Asian-American, Latino, Arab and other minority-related organizations to religious, labor, and civil rights groups of all kinds.
Some opponents make practical arguments against it: that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to implement, that it would create chaos and confusion at DMVs nationwide, and so on. Others warn that the act is anti-immigrant, since it targets asylum-seekers and, as The Washington Post editorialized, “will turn motor vehicle departments across the country into de facto enforcers of immigration law.” Josh Bernstein of the National Immigration Law Center calls REAL ID “the most extreme anti-immigrant legislation that has a good chance of passing in decades.” And others point out that REAL ID is a step toward a chilling, privacy-violating national ID card system that could one day have Americans being asked, Nazi-style, to “show us your papers” wherever they go. It could vastly accelerate the creation of one giant, government-owned database storing nearly unlimited quantities of personal, financial, medical and other records on citizens and non-citizens alike.
The REAL ID is posing as a weapon in the war against terrorism, but the history of the idea long predates the current preoccupation with the terrorist threat, and the provisions of the REAL ID Act seem to have more to do with anti-immigrant measures, wall-building in southern California, and the like than they do with forestalling another 9/11. Even its backers, including Sensenbrenner, fail to cite examples of Al Qaeda types who used fake driver's licenses to carry out acts of violence. Partly that’s because not a single act of terrorism has occurred in the United States in the nearly four years since 9/11. But that doesn’t stop Sensenbrenner from sounding as if terrorists are everywhere and only Real ID can stop them. Terrorists, he fulminates, have “'used almost every conceivable means of entering the country. … They have come as students, tourists, and business visitors. They have also been [legal permanent residents] and naturalized U.S. citizens. They have snuck across the border illegally, arrived as stowaways on ships, used false passports, and have been granted amnesty. Terrorists have even used America's humanitarian tradition of welcoming those seeking asylum. We must plug these gaps.”
Sensenbrenner and his allies plan to plug those gaps by rushing the bill though Congress without hearings, attaching it parasitically to the Iraq-Afghanistan spending bill. Like the PATRIOT Act—which was hustled through a terrified Congress in the dead of night just weeks after 9/11—REAL ID is likely to become law because members of Congress don’t have the guts to stand up to the White House and its continuing manipulation of fears about terrorism. It makes you wonder who really does “hate our freedoms.”
