The REAL ID Act.
The U.S. House passed H.R. 418 by a vote of 261 to 161. H.R. 418 is one of those bills in which there is something for every one to hate. The pragmatist in me says YES! FINALLY! Somebody is starting to do something about illegal immigration besides simply talking about how bad the problem is. However, the cynic in me is saying “This could be some of the worst legislation ever passed” .
Allow me to explain.......
H.R. 418, or the “REAL ID Act”, claims to “establish and rapidly implement regulations for State driver’s license and identification document security standards, to prevent terrorists from abusing the asylum laws of the United States, to unify terrorism-related grounds for inadmissibility and removal, and to ensure expeditious construction of the San Diego border fence.”
Basically, this bill is a Federal over-ride of the leniency shown by the 12 states who currently issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants. Since every current State driver’s license can be easily counterfeited, there will be national standards for encrypting information on the cards so that information can be read, ensuring that the license holder is 1) the actual person in the picture, and 2) a legal resident of the US. This information will be linked to a National Database.
Supposedly, airport security screeners can scan this card ( which will either have information encrypted into a magnetic strip, encrypted into the picture, or have a computer chip imbedded) and quickly identify possible threats from “bad guys” trying to board a plane. When scanned, the information will be matched with the National database to see if the license holder is legitimate. On the surface, this may sound like a reasonable step to preventing another 19 highjackers boarding our planes and perpetrating another 9-11 on us.
However,
What this bill actually does is to establish a “National ID Card”. All states will be required to become willing participants in the creation of the National database. Nevermind the state’s rights angle of this for a moment and let’s look at this National ID card is a bad idea in the first place.
While Sensenbrener may have had the very best of intentons for drafting this legislation, I doubt he was considering the fact that government abuse of it’s own programs is not the exception, rather, the rule. For example, several years from now, let’s suppose that the Michael Moore types finally get their way and convince lawmakers to enact “gun conrtol” by requiring gun owners to turn in all handguns. How would the Government even know who owns handguns in the first place? Well, each state currently requires a firearm purchaser to provide a driver’s license at the time of purchase. With the National database of firearm purchasers at their fingertips, the gun grabbers will have an easy time in trampling the Second Amendment rights of those gun owners.
This phenomenon will go much further than simply trampling the rights of gun owners, it will become engrained in every public aspect of our lives. While I believe that is not the intention of the bill as it is written today, there is no way of preventing future legisators from “adding on” to the use of this database. Our every movement can and probably will be tracked every day as we make purchases, travel, even register for classes. The possible result is the ultimate intrusion to our privacy ever witnessed. We will all be tracked, all day, every day.
Except.
Except for the people who are here illegally. Those people will be able to move among us un-noticed. They’ll ride the bus, they’ll pay with cash, they’ll steal what they need to build their bombs, and they’ll only use black market guns. The only people affected by this legislation will be the very folks it is intended to protect.
Now there are provisions in the bill which might be viewed as positive. The Bill allows the fence to be built on the border despite the numerous lawsuits that are currently holding the project up. Still, I’ve seen the video of illegals scaling the fence and I know for a fact that a fence is not enough. Without people ( the military perhaps) patrolling the fence, it will only serve to slow down the illegals a few minutes before they enter the country. Additionally, the bill allows Judges to scrutinize so-called assylum seekers, and allows them to deny assylum to someone who is blantantly lying. Under current law, assylum is granted to virtually everyone who requests it, regardless of how transparently false their story may be. This is the silver lining of this bill, but it is not so good that it makes up for how bad the rest of the bill is.
In as much as I believe that the lawmakers who passed this bill really want to do something to address the problem of illegal immigration and the threat of terrorism, I don’t believe this bill will do much to curb either problem. The only people who will be tracked on this National database will be legal citizens, since the driver’s licenses will not be issued to the illegals. Why would the lawmakers draft a bill to track law abiding citizens, when they are trying to catch the bad guys?
The cynic in me would say that in the future, the legal gun owners of today are going to be considered the bad guys of tommorow. How convinient for the Government to have a nice big of list of our names, addresses, the guns we purchased, and even where we pump our gas.
You can bet the gun grabbers are grinning from ear to ear today.
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