In 2006, New Hampshire was the first state in the country to reject compliance with the Republican-backed REAL ID Act, an unconstitutional expansion of federal power over state identification cards. This led to a wave of states doing the same, effectively nullifying the federal act in practice.
Each year the DHS claimed they would implement the act over the objections of the states, and each year they had to back off, because they simply couldn’t get the job done politically.
Here we are, almost a decade later, and DHS again is threatening people and states with a new deadline looming. Bills in some states are seeking to turn back previous rejections of the federal act. And yesterday, a New Hampshire Senate committee unanimously killed a bill to do just that.
This narrative from Jim Harper at CATO gives all the details – on the early days of the Act, what’s been happening, and how it was killed a second time in New Hampshire.
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