What's emerging is a Barr-backed plan that would just delay the proposal a year or so -- which is unacceptable to opponents of any national ID plan. "Certainly we advocate a complete repeal. Anything short of that would be a defeat," says Patrick Poole, deputy director of the Free Congress Foundation's Center for Technology Policy. Poole has found an ally in Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who's introduced legislation to rescind the Transportation Department plan. Paul blames Congress for passing the law in the first place, then trying to shift the blame to the Transportation Department. "It has been said even by the author of the immigration bill that the intent was not to have a national ID card -- but if members would read the regulations now being written by the Department of Transportation, it can be seen as nothing else," Paul said.
Congress's Identity Crisis
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How badly does Congress want to nix a national ID card? Not very. Late in the evening last Wednesday, Rep. Bob Barr (R-Ga.) tried to yank spending for a Department of Transportation ID card proposal that would compel states to encode Social Security numbers (and possibly digitized fingerprints) into driver's licenses. Barr's ploy didn't work. Democrats defended the plan as a way to let immigrants prove they're citizens. Other Republicans suggested Barr try to forge a compromise with transportation bureaucrats, which he'll do in a meeting this week.