Let’s dispense with the mythology right up front. A driver’s license has never been just about driving. When the first ones were issued in the early 1900s, the idea was to collect fees, not to test driving skills. More recently, revoking licenses became a way to punish people who didn’t pay child support or, in Wisconsin, shovel snow off their walks. In its most coveted form, the license is proof of age–or of fraud, as the case may be. In college, for example, I was not Amanda Ripley from New Jersey; I was Amanda Jones from California. I lived on Yellowbrick Road and looked suspiciously joyful in the photo, which was taken in the dorm room of an unsavory character to whom I had paid $40. Congress is expected this week to reinterpret the driver’s license yet again. The license will never, of course, be called a national ID card, which evokes jackboots and imperial forces in the minds of many Americans. But the new law would make it function a lot like a national ID that comes in 50 varieties. To begin with, states would have to ensure that everyone who gets an official license is in the U.S. legally. Nine states do not have that requirement, and not all the others verify the authenticity of the immigration documents that they demand. The new law would also mandate certain standard details on licenses, including a digital photo . And it would require that states store all that information, along with residents’ driving histories and points, in a database that every other state could access. The bill’s supporters say it would not establish a national ID card, since no one has to get a driver’s license or state ID. That’s correct. Such documents are useful only if you need to drive, fly, cash checks, apply for certain jobs or enter federal buildings. If you are a wealthy recluse with liquid assets, it doesn’t concern you. It’s also true that a state could decline to link its database or verify immigration status, but then federal officials would not accept its licenses as proof of identity. The bill would, however, allow states to issue illegal immigrants special driver’s licenses, as Utah and Tennessee do, that allow driving but are unusable for official identification at airports or federal buildings. For most Americans, the most obvious effect of such changes would be longer lines at the department of motor vehicles . States would have three years to comply, and all existing licenses would remain valid. But meeting the new verification requirements would entail some heavy lifting by state authorities and “would be hard for the Federal Government to handle, let alone state governments,” says David Quam of the National Governors Association, which opposes the bill. For example, if a driver applied for a license in Massachusetts with a Maryland birth certificate, Massachusetts DMV officials would need to check with Maryland to make sure the document was legit. “You’re no longer going to get same-day service,” predicts Cheye Calvo of the National Conference of State Legislatures.
