Driver’s license vendors already know about the states’ decades-long resistance to REAL ID, and I bet you do too.
Anthony Kimery of Biometric Update put a fundamental truth succinctly:
“The saga of the REAL ID pushback reveals a deep and ongoing tension at the heart of American governance: the friction between national imperatives and state autonomy.”
Kimery’s article, “Twenty years later the REAL ID debate refuses to go away,” captures the history of this federal-state tension over the years.
Beginning with some states telling the federal government to get out of their affairs, as well as expressing budgetary concerns about federal mandates that the federal government wouldn’t fund, Anthony Kimery’s REAL ID tale concludes with all the states and territories achieving technical compliance with REAL ID…two decades later.
(Why did the states surrender to the federal REAL ID mandates? Because as much as the states complained about federal overreach…in the end the federal government controlled the airports. If you wanted to fly, you had to get a federal passport…or bend your state driver’s license to the federal rules. And you might recall that airport security was the whole reason for REAL IDs in the first place.)
At the end of Kimery’s story, concerns have come full circle. States that maintained that they have the right to determine how they issue their own driver’s licenses are angry at how OTHER states exercise the right to issue THEIR own driver’s licenses.
“Early this year,…Wyoming passed legislation invalidating out-of-state driver’s licenses issued to undocumented immigrants.”
Maybe we need a national ID?
If you’re curious about what Bredemarket has said about REAL ID over the years, I’ve collected a few samples:
- REAL ID: When Enforcement Isn’t Enforcement. (That May 7 date isn’t hard and fast.)
- Alaska HB389 does NOT repeal REAL ID. But it has a “foreign ownership” clause. (If you know the driver’s license production industry, you understand this bill’s significance.)
- How 6 CFR 37 (REAL IDs) exhibits…federalism.
And if your company sells driver’s license services, but your staff is too swamped to tell your story, you can obtain the services of a consultant who can create 22 (or more) types of internal and external content. Contact Bredemarket: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/
(Image: Transportation Security Administration Checkpoint at John Glenn Columbus International Airport. By Michael Ball – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=77279000.)
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