State officials earn honors from MCLU Secretary of state, two legislators helped stop Real ID Act in Maine

BANGOR – People usually get awards for the things they accomplish, not the things they don’t do.

But Maine’s secretary of state and two legislators were honored Thursday by the Maine Civil Liberties Union for not supporting the implementation of the Real ID Act, a national identification card program touted by the Bush administration as a way to curb terrorism and illegal immigration.

Matthew Dunlap, Sen. Elizabeth “Libby” Mitchell, D-Vassalboro, and Rep. Scott Lansley, R-Sabbatus, were recognized with the MCLU’s 2007 Roger Baldwin Award in an evening event at the Bangor Public Library attended by nearly 50 people.

Mitchell and Lansley were unable to attend the Bangor event. A similar ceremony was held in Portland on Wednesday night.

A year ago, Maine was the first state in the nation to reject the plan when the Legislature overwhelmingly passed a nonbinding resolution that urged the U.S. Congress to repeal the law. The resolution also forbid the secretary of state from implementing any provisions of the federal law that required states to change their drivers’ licenses so they could be used as national identification cards linked to a central database.

Mitchell and Lansley sponsored the resolution and Dunlap supported it.

“It was a rare instance of the triumph of reason over fear,” Zachary L. Heiden of the MCLU said of the Legislature’s refusal on Jan. 25, 2007, to implement the act’s provisions.

Sixteen states followed suit, Shenna Bellows, executive director of the MCLU, said Thursday in presenting the award to Dunlap.

“If you want to understand what Real ID is about, go rent ‘Casablanca,'” Dunlap said. “It’s a great love story and all that, but it’s also about who is going to get the letters of transit so they can leave Casablanca, get to Portugal, then get to America to escape Nazi oppression. In a large way, we’re still trying to get those letters of transit so we can get out of Casablanca.”

Drivers’ licenses were not designed to be used as a form of identification, but to show that people could operate a vehicle safely, the secretary of state said. States started putting photos and dates of birth on them to curb underage drinking.

The Real ID law was motivated by the Sept. 11 terrorists who used legitimate drivers’ licenses before the 2001 attacks, The Associated Press reported last year. It seeks to unify the different licensing laws in the 50 states and to make it harder to obtain a license fraudulently.

The MCLU and its parent organization, the American Civil Liberties Union, have been vigilant about making sure the U.S. Constitution isn’t shredded in the process of implementing a national identification system, Bellows said.

“The question boils down to what process do we put in place that prevents terrorism without cutting a swath through the thousands that mean us no harm,” Dunlap said.

An announcement that the implementation of Real ID has been put off until 2018 is expected today in Washington, D.C., the secretary of state said.

“That’s 17 years after the terrorist attacks,” Dunlap said. “From a cold start to putting a man on the moon only took nine years.”

Preventing terrorists, illegal immigrants or identity thieves from getting identification they aren’t entitled to is not the philosophy behind Real ID, he told the group.

“I realized what this is really about one day when I’d gotten some information from the Department of Homeland Security that I wanted to share with Shenna [Bellows],” Dunlap said. “So, I forwarded it to my home e-mail from work, so I could forward it to her. I did that because I’d asked myself, ‘What if someone’s watching?’ That’s what this is all about.”