The Ron Paul Beacon

The REAL ID Act, signed into law in 2005, provides for nationally-standardized ID cards to be designated to residents of the US by each individual state.  It originally was scheduled to take effect in mid-2008, but that deadline has since been rescheduled for late 2009.  Ron Paul, as a congressman and as a candidate for president, has consistently opposed the measure.  This may not seem threatening to some people at the moment.  After all, it’s just a harmless card with your picture on it-right?  Wrong.  As Ron Paul has pointed out in his speeches, a national ID card is just another assault on civil liberties on the part of the federal government in the name of war.  Paralleling the issue of gun control, measures that require guns or a certain type of gun to be “registered” with the government may seem harmless.  After all, it’s no big deal-the government just wants to know where those guns are so they can fight crime better.  Right?  Afraid not.  Some time later when the government decided to ban assault weapons entirely, they simply used the registration list they compiled before to confiscate the guns from private law-abiding citizens and render them powerless against criminals who possess such guns illegally.  In the end the gun registration laws served as nothing but a tool to empower the government to infringe upon the rights of the people.  It did not help fight crime any more than the national ID card will help fight terrorism.  Rounding up registered guns may be mirrored by the rounding up of people unjustly.  And rest-assured, this “war-time measure” will not disappear when the war ends.  In the Shadow Children Series by Margaret Peterson Haddix, which I started reading a few years ago a futuristic totalitarian government keeps track of its citizens through an ID card, deprives them of virtually any inalienable right and pulls strings on their lives from behind the scenes without their knowing about it.  That is not the kind of society we want to become.

Besides the obvious threat to freedom, the REAL ID Act can be viewed as just another example of Big Government.  In practice the REAL ID Act would require an expansive and expensive bureaucracy to operate.  The bill for this would be sent to the common taxpayer-just another example of the Neoconservatives failing to live up to the limited government promises of the 1994 Contract with America.  The Act is also not in line with the principles of the Constitution-with the Federal Government over-imposing itself on state-run systems, which is counter to the spirit of the 10^th Amendment.

There is hope for opposing the act.  18 states have already refused to comply with this law of the federal government and legislation is pending in 20 more.  This means that we may potentially have ¾ of all states challenging the National ID Card.  Not only does the REAL ID Act rely on the state governments to enforce it, but states have been able to nullify laws passed by the Federal Government in the past.  In the late 1790s, when Adams was President and Jefferson was Vice President, the Federal Government passed a law that prohibited criticism of the government by common citizens.  Jefferson, who was actually the political rival of Adams and his Vice President, due to the electoral system at the time, took it to the states and the states subsequently decided that the law in question was unconstitutional and therefore nullified it.  With Ron Paul as president, the executive branch would no longer pursue the standards of the REAl ID Act.  His term would begin in January 2009, almost a year before the Act takes effect-and plenty of time for action.