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Comment by rblatz | Hacker News Reader

But the federal government was not granted the power to enforce how states issue IDs.

Nor is the federal government mandated to accept a state ID for federal identification purposes if it decides that the procedures for issuing those IDs does not meet certain minimum standards.

The problem is that the federal government is pestering the states about it. If they wanted to just require you to use a federal passport they could, but then citizens would object to that for much the same reasons they object to this.

One scenario is that federal regulations might require you to acquire and show a federal passport in order to board a flight originating and terminating in your own state.

I don't know about anyone else, but I was raised to believe that requiring internal passports for travel is a hallmark of repressive authoritarian regimes.

That's the issue. People see straight through it when you require an actual passport, so they're trying to turn a driver's license into an internal passport and hope nobody connects the dots.

It's turtles all the way down.

I think you'll find that many of the activities they want us to use a federally-acceptable ID for are not, themselves, covered in Article I Section 8.

But they can specify what kind of IDs are necessary to enter federally managed areas such as military bases and other agencies.

To some degree perhaps, but it also cannot discriminate against citizens of certain states, as that would be a clear violation of the 14th Amendment.[1] Depending on the test you use for what counts as discrimination, you might find that disallowing certain states' IDs is illegal and/or unconstitutional; for instance, it is clearly discriminatory based on a disparate impact analysis.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_Protection_Clause

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