Drivers License, Please

California has some 900 new laws going into effect later this week (first of the year), including one that permits illegal aliens to obtain drivers licenses so that they “can drive in this state legally.” Without commenting on the immigration issue, the illogicality of California laws sometimes staggers the imagination.

First of all, if one cannot be here legally, how can one drive here legally? I guess a certain amount of hair splitting can be done to make that meet a degree of logic, but it gets nuttier if you dig deeper into what this new drivers license is.

If you are a legal resident of California you have to provide an original birth certificate, a copy will not do, or a passport in order to obtain a drivers license. If you are illegal you merely have to show something with an address. That’s because the illegal’s license is stamped with a disclaimer saying that the license “cannot be used for identification.”

If it cannot be used for identification, how can it be used as a drivers license? How does a traffic officer know that you are not handing him a document which says that someone else is licensed to drive, since this cannot be used to identify that you are, in fact, you? He could look at the picture, but the license itself instructs him not to do that.

He can’t check the license against the registration to see if you are, maybe, driving a stolen car, because the license does not tell him who you are. It tells him only that, whoever you are, you are allowed to drive, presumably because you posses the license regardless of your actual identity.

Presumably, if you give the license to your cousin Dimitri, it would permit him to drive too, and the fact that he is six inches taller than you, outweighs you by ninety pounds and is not female while you are would not present a problem because cops are not permitted to use the card for identification.

The anomalies are not caused by California, of course, they are caused by the federal “RealID” program which California had to circumvent in order to issue licenses to illegals. Many states simply refused to comply with the federal program which creates a national identification card at state expense, but California was not one of them.

I don’t think we should have a national identification card, and I don’t think the states should have been forced to pay for it.