WASHINGTON--In the long-running Real ID staring match, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security ended up being the first to blink.
Homeland Security announced Wednesday that all 50 states and the District of Columbia will be technically Real ID-compliant by the May 11, 2008 deadline--even though many states actually have rejected the concept and have zero plans to embrace a national ID card.
This means Americans will face no new hassles when using their drivers licenses to enter federal buildings or fly on airplanes starting on May 11. That's a good thing.
But the way this turned out is so odd it's worth repeating. States including New Hampshire, Maine, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Washington, and Montana have enacted laws saying "hell no we'll never comply with Real ID." And Homeland Security officials carefully ignored those public votes of condemnation, instead pretending that those states really intend to acquiesce by the next major deadline of December 31, 2009. (See our special report on Real ID from earlier this year.)
"Now they've got 18 months to actually finish the process of being able to issue the cards that will meet the requirements," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told a small group of reporters and bloggers here on Wednesday. "We will have to watch this because the one thing that will be important is for a state not to be dilatory in completing the process."
That may have been a more serious threat a few years ago, when Chertoff was beginning his defense of the Real ID Act, which became law as part of a must-pass tsunami relief and Iraq emergency appropriations bill in 2005.
Now, however, state officials realize that Homeland Security is more likely to back down than not. The first sign of this came when the agency decided to treat a request for an extension past May 11 as a formal agreement to comply with all Real ID rules. The second came when Homeland Security retreated to its fallback position: even a symbolic gesture on the part of a governor amounted to full compliance.
A good example of this dynamic is what happened in the last few days involving Maine, a state that has rejected Real ID in no uncertain terms, and was the only will-have-trouble-at-airports state as of this morning. Its legislation approved last year says that it "refuses to implement the Real ID Act and thereby protest the treatment by Congress and the president of the states as agents of the federal government."
Maine nevertheless asked the feds not to penalize its travelers. Stewart Baker, Homeland Security assistant secretary for policy, replied in a letter that if Maine "is prepared to commit" to embracing Real ID by 5 p.m. on April 2, "we will grant an extension conditioned upon performance of these commitments." (The commitments Baker requested include using a Homeland Security identity verification system, using facial recognition technology so someone can't get two licenses, and so on.)
In response, Gov. John Baldacci, a Democrat, wrote back to Baker saying in part:
I will seek legislation to halt Maine's current practice of issuing licenses to those not present lawfully in the United States. I will submit legislation, which includes a funding source and appropriations, that will adopt three changes in Maine's licensing processes: Maine will enter into an agreement with USCIS and utilize the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program to verify DHS documents presented by non-citizens. Maine will begin capturing and maintaining photographs of each individual applying for a license or state identification card, even if no license is issued.
I will seek legislation to halt Maine's current practice of issuing licenses to those not present lawfully in the United States.
I will submit legislation, which includes a funding source and appropriations, that will adopt three changes in Maine's licensing processes:
Maine will enter into an agreement with USCIS and utilize the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements Program to verify DHS documents presented by non-citizens.
Maine will begin capturing and maintaining photographs of each individual applying for a license or state identification card, even if no license is issued.
It worked. Maine got a green check mark, and its licenses will continue to be valid for federal purposes after May 11--even though Baldacci was, for the most part, merely promising to introduce legislation. And the Maine legislators, who soundly rebuked the Bush administration by nearly unanimous votes last year, will be the ones to vote on it.
Last month, Montana took a similar approach. Its governor, Brian Schweitzer, a Democrat, has repeatedly denounced Real ID and even called on his counterparts (PDF) in other states to oppose it. But Homeland Security dutifully accepted a relatively hostile letter from Schweitzer--saying he will never "authorize implementation of the Real ID Act"--as good enough.
Now that the May 11 deadline has become effectively meaningless, the next major deadline is December 31, 2009, at which point Homeland Security currently says it will require "certification that the state has achieved the benchmarks set forth in the Material Compliance Checklist."
In political terms, that's a long time--and a new presidential administration--away. Some opponents of Real ID are already predicting that no state will actually comply with the deadline, or, alternatively, the next administration will find a way to quietly dispose of Real ID without much fanfare.
"DHS is not in power here," said Jim Harper, the director of information policy studies at the free-market Cato Institute. "The states are in power. DHS has done all it could, but from a position of weakness...DHS put the best face it could on its capitulation to states with backbone. A lot more states will recognize that they own this issue, they control this debate."
News.com's Anne Broache contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.
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From www.news.com April 2, 2008
Posted by Declan McCullagh
These possible solutions to the first global food crisis since World War II—which the World Food Program says already threatens 20 million of the poorest children—are complex and controversial. And they may not even solve the problem as demand continues to soar.
A "silent tsunami" of hunger is sweeping the world's most desperate nations, said Josette Sheeran, the WFP's executive director, speaking Tuesday at a London summit on the crisis.
The skyrocketing cost of food staples, stoked by rising fuel prices, unpredictable weather and demand from India and China, has already sparked sometimes violent protests across the Caribbean, Africa and Asia.
The price of rice has more than doubled in the last five weeks, she said. The World Bank estimates food prices have risen by 83 percent in three years.
"What we are seeing now is affecting more people on every continent," Sheeran told a news conference.
Hosting talks with Sheeran, lawmakers and experts, British Prime Gordon Brown said the spiraling prices threaten to plunge millions back into poverty and reverse progress on alleviating misery in the developing world.
"Tackling hunger is a moral challenge to each of us and it is also a threat to the political and economic stability of nations," Brown said.
Malaysia's embattled prime minister is already under pressure over the price increases and has launched a major rice-growing project. Indonesia's government needed to revise its annual budget to respond.
Unrest over the food crisis has led to deaths in Cameroon and Haiti, cost Haitian Prime Minister Jacques Edouard Alexis his job, and caused hungry textile workers to clash with police in Bangladesh.
Former U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan said more protests in other developing nations appear likely. "We are going through a very serious crisis and we are going to see lots of food strikes and demonstrations," Annan told reporters in Geneva.
At streetside restaurants in Lome, Togo, even the traditional balls of corn meal or corn dough served with vegetable soup are shrinking. Once as big as a boxer's fist, the dumplings are now the size of a tennis ball—but cost twice as much.
In Yaounde, Cameroon, civil servant Samuel Ebwelle, 51, said he fears food prices will rise further.
"We are getting to the worst period of our life," he said. "We've had to reduce the number of meals we take a day from three to two. Breakfast no longer exists on our menu."
Even if her call for $500 million in emergency funding is met, food aid programs—including work to feed 20 million poor children—will be hit this year, Sheeran said.
President Bush has released $200 million in urgent aid. Britain pledged an immediate $59.7 million on Tuesday.
Even so, school feeding projects in Kenya and Cambodia have been scaled back and food aid has been cut in half in Tajikistan, Sheeran said.
Yet while angry street protesters call for immediate action, long term solutions are likely to be slow, costly and complicated, experts warn.
And evolving diets among burgeoning middle classes in India and China will help double the demand for food—particularly grain intensive meat and dairy products—by 2030, the World Bank says.
Robert Zoellick, the bank's head, claims as many as 100 million people could be forced deeper into poverty. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon said rising food costs threaten to cancel strides made toward the goal of cutting world poverty in half by 2015.
"Now is not too soon to be thinking about the longer-term solutions," said Alex Evans, a former adviser to Britain's Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.
He said world leaders must help increase food production, rethink their push on biofuels—which many blame for pushing up food prices—and consider anew the once taboo topic of growing genetically modified crops.
But Evans, now a visiting fellow at New York University's Center on International Cooperation, said increasing the amount of land that can be farmed in the developing world will be arduous.
"It's almost like new oil or gas fields; they'll tend to be the hardest to reach places, that need new roads and new infrastructure to be viable," he said.
The will to increase food production exists, as does most of the necessary skills, but there are major obstacles, including a lack of government investment in agriculture and—in Africa particularly—a scarcity of fertilizers, good irrigation and access to markets.
"Many African farmers are very entrepreneurial, but they simply aren't connected to markets," said Lawrence Haddad, an economist and director of Britain's Institute of Development Studies. "They find there are no chilling plants for milk and no grinding mills for coffee."
Haddad said the likely impact of food price increases should have been anticipated. "The fact no one has previously made the link between agriculture and poverty is quite incredible," he said.
Just as new land for farming is available in Russia and Brazil, new genetically modified crops resistant to drought, or which deliver additional nutrients, could be better targeted to different regions of the developing world, Evans said. "The solutions are more nuanced than we previously thought," he added.
Sheeran said developing world governments, particularly in Africa, will need to dedicate at least 10 percent of future budgets to agriculture to boost global production.
Some experts predict other countries could follow the example of Pakistan, which has revived the use of ration cards for subsidized wheat.
The production of biofuels also needs to be urgently re-examined, Brown said.
He acknowledged that Britain this month introduced targets aimed at producing 5 percent of transport fuel from biofuels by 2010, but said his government and others should review their policies.
Production of biofuel leads to the destruction of forests and takes up land available to grow crops for food.
Brown said the impact of the food crisis won't just be felt in the developing world, but also in the checkout lane of Western supermarkets. "It it is not surprising that we see our shopping bills go up," Brown said.
Many analysts, including Britain's opposition leader David Cameron, claim that people in the West will need to eat less meat—and consume, or waste, less food in general. Some expect the shift in attitudes to herald the end of supermarket giveaways and cost-cutting grocery stores that stack goods to the ceiling and sell in bulk.
Citizens in the West, China and India must realize that the meat on their plate and biofuels in their expensive cars carry a cost for those in the developing world, Evans said.
Sheeran believes many already understand the impact. "Much of the world is waking up to the fact that food does not spontaneously appear on grocery store shelves," she said.
"'I don't think there's any question about it,' says Rick Santorum, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and a devout Catholic, who was the first to give Bush the 'Catholic president' label. 'He's certainly much more Catholic than Kennedy.'"
"Yet this Protestant president has surrounded himself with Roman Catholic intellectuals, speechwriters, professors, priests, bishops and politicians. These Catholics -- and thus Catholic social teaching -- have for the past eight years been shaping Bush's speeches, policies and legacy to a degree perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history."
Shortly after Pope Benedict XVI's election in 2005, President Bush met with a small circle of advisers in the Oval Office. As some mentioned their own religious backgrounds, the president remarked that he had read one of the new pontiff's books about faith and culture in Western Europe.
Save for one other soul, Bush was the only non-Catholic in the room. But his interest in the pope's writings was no surprise to those around him. As the White House prepares to welcome Benedict on Tuesday, many in Bush's inner circle expect the pontiff to find a kindred spirit in the president. Because if Bill Clinton can be called America's first black president, some say, then George W. Bush could well be the nation's first Catholic president.
This isn't as strange a notion as it sounds. Yes, there was John F. Kennedy. But where Kennedy sought to divorce his religion from his office, Bush has welcomed Roman Catholic doctrine and teachings into the White House and based many important domestic policy decisions on them.
"I don't think there's any question about it," says Rick Santorum, former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania and a devout Catholic, who was the first to give Bush the "Catholic president" label. "He's certainly much more Catholic than Kennedy."
Bush attends an Episcopal church in Washington and belongs to a Methodist church in Texas, and his political base is solidly evangelical. Yet this Protestant president has surrounded himself with Roman Catholic intellectuals, speechwriters, professors, priests, bishops and politicians. These Catholics -- and thus Catholic social teaching -- have for the past eight years been shaping Bush's speeches, policies and legacy to a degree perhaps unprecedented in U.S. history.
"I used to say that there are more Catholics on President Bush's speechwriting team than on any Notre Dame starting lineup in the past half-century," said former Bush scribe -- and Catholic -- William McGurn.
Bush has also placed Catholics in prominent roles in the federal government and relied on Catholic tradition to make a public case for everything from his faith-based initiative to antiabortion legislation. He has wedded Catholic intellectualism with evangelical political savvy to forge a powerful electoral coalition.
"There is an awareness in the White House that the rich Catholic intellectual tradition is a resource for making the links between Christian faith, religiously grounded moral judgments and public policy," says Richard John Neuhaus, a Catholic priest and editor of the journal First Things who has tutored Bush in the church's social doctrines for nearly a decade.
In the late 1950s, Kennedy's Catholicism was a political albatross, and he labored to distance himself from his church. Accepting the Democratic nomination in 1960, he declared his religion "not relevant."
Bush and his administration, by contrast, have had no such qualms about their Catholic connections. At times, they've even seemed to brandish them for political purposes. Even before he got to the White House, Bush and his political guru Karl Rove invited Catholic intellectuals to Texas to instruct the candidate on the church's social teachings. In January 2001, Bush's first public outing as president in the nation's capital was a dinner with Washington's then-archbishop, Theodore McCarrick. A few months later, Rove (an Episcopalian) asked former White House Catholic adviser Deal Hudson to find a priest to bless his West Wing office.
"There was a very self-conscious awareness that religious conservatives had brought Bush into the White House and that [the administration] wanted to do what they had been mandated to do," says Hudson.
To conservative Catholics, that meant holding the line on same-sex marriage, euthanasia and embryonic stem cell research, and working to limit abortion in the United States and abroad while nominating judges who would eventually outlaw it. To make the case, Bush has often borrowed Pope John Paul II's mantra of promoting a "culture of life." Many Catholics close to him believe that the approximately 300 judges he has seated on the federal bench -- most notably Catholics John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court -- may yet be his greatest legacy.
Bush also used Catholic doctrine and rhetoric to push his faith-based initiative, a movement to open federal funding to grass-roots religious groups that provide social services to their communities. Much of that initiative is based on the Catholic principle of "subsidiarity" -- the idea that local people are in the best position to solve local problems. "The president probably knows absolutely nothing about the Catholic catechism, but he's very familiar with the principle of subsidiarity," said H. James Towey, former director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives who is now the president of a Catholic college in southwestern Pennsylvania. "It's the sense that the government is not the savior and that problems like poverty have spiritual roots."
Nonetheless, Bush is not without his Catholic critics. Some contend that his faith-based rhetoric is just small-government conservatism dressed up in religious vestments, and that his economic policies, including tax cuts for the rich, have created a wealth gap that clearly upends the Catholic principle of solidarity with the poor.
John Carr, a top public policy director for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, calls the Bush administration's legacy a "tale of two policies."
"The best of the Bush administration can be seen in their work in development assistance on HIV/AIDS in Africa," says Carr. "In domestic policy, the conservatism trumps the compassion."
And other prominent Catholics charge the president with disregarding Rome's teachings on the Iraq war and torture. But even when he has taken actions that the Vatican opposes, such as invading Iraq, Bush has shown deference to church teachings. Before he sent U.S. troops into Baghdad to topple Saddam Hussein, he met with Catholic "theocons" to discuss just-war theory. White House adviser Leonard Leo, who heads Catholic outreach for the Republican National Committee, says that Bush "has engaged in dialogue with Catholics and shared perspectives with Catholics in a way I think is fairly unique in American politics."
Moreover, people close to Bush say that he has professed a not-so-secret admiration for the church's discipline and is personally attracted to the breadth and unity of its teachings. A New York priest who has befriended the president said that Bush respects the way Catholicism starts at the foundation -- with the notion that the papacy is willed by God and that the pope is Peter's successor. "I think what fascinates him about Catholicism is its historical plausibility," says this priest. "He does appreciate the systematic theology of the church, its intellectual cogency and stability." The priest also says that Bush "is not unaware of how evangelicalism -- by comparison with Catholicism -- may seem more limited both theologically and historically."
Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, another evangelical with an affinity for Catholic teaching, says that the key to understanding Bush's domestic policy is to view it through the lens of Rome. Others go a step further.
Paul Weyrich, an architect of the religious right, detects in Bush shades of former British prime minister Tony Blair, who converted to Catholicism last year. "I think he is a secret believer," Weyrich says of Bush. Similarly, John DiIulio, Bush's first director of faith-based initiatives, has called the president a "closet Catholic." And he was only half-kidding.
