Stateline.org has noticed the Real ID controversy, but hasn’t figured out what’s going on. They keep reporting blather about how “citizens of states that are not compliant would be unhappy when they realize they can’t use their driver’s licenses to board flights“. They haven’t figured out yet that no federal statute can disenfranchise every citizen of Nevada, Washington, Montana, and New Hampshire from their fundamental rights. The federal government cannot constitutionally pass a law that prohibits Montanans from flying to Texas — or that prevents them from entering a federal courthouse to witness a public trial.

The states are no longer in post-9/11 mania; they are showing sense. The Feds are still trying to milk the mania long past the public’s former tolerance, as if they can’t quite believe the years of carte blanche are over. As usual when someone questions its authority, the Federal response is to ratchet up the punishment. Now there’s a bill in the Senate claiming that no citizen of those four states will be able to legally hold a job! The Feds might as well straightforwardly declare them “unpersons” and order that they be shot on sight. Their fellow unperson employers will just ignore that federal pronouncement, too.

And the excuse for this shoddy regimentation? There’s a secret blacklist of people who the US Government believes are so innocent that they can’t be arrested, nor put on the “Most Wanted” list — but so dangerous they can’t be given the same rights as everybody else, and can’t challenge their dalit status in a court. Can you say “claptrap”? I knew you could. So, the reason all 300 million citizens of the US need to get their Real National ID card is so the Feds will know that anybody who has such a card isn’t one of these few thousand dangerous people on the no-fly blacklist. That’s the reason. Ask DHS if you don’t believe me.

There’s a word for when a government is totally concerned with whether the paperwork about you was properly filed in their database, and totally unconcerned with whether you are an innocent person just trying to exercise the basic rights of your life, like freedom of movement, observing the workings of government, the right to work, and liberty of contract. I’ll let you recall it yourself.