Nathaniel Cary

ncary@greenvillenews.com

South Carolinians will still be able to use driver’s licenses as identification to fly out of airports in South Carolina and to gain entrance into federal buildings and military bases for now, but that could change if the state doesn’t enhance its driver’s license security enough to please the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security recently issued its latest deadline in a longstanding back-and-forth with states over the security of driver’s licenses, but it granted many states, including South Carolina, an extension that will last through October 10, 2016.

At issue is REAL ID, passed by the federal government a decade ago as an anti-terrorism measure, that requires state’s motor vehicle departments to meet certain security driver’s license benchmarks.

But the act was bucked by many states, including South Carolina, who saw it both an unfunded mandate and potential security risk.

South Carolina passed a law – S449 – in 2007 that forbade the state from implementing REAL ID. It is one of 12 states with similar laws banning implementation.

The state’s Department of Motor Vehicles is forbidden from even attempting to comply with the law, said Beth Parks, SCDMV spokeswoman.

South Carolina has made its own enhancements to the security of driver’s licenses and identification cards and does meet many of the requirements of REAL ID anyway, Parks said.

So far, that has been enough to keep any restrictions at bay.

But federal officials soon may determine whether Transportation Security Administration agents will begin enforcement of restrictions in some states.

And visitors or contractors to military bases, federal buildings and nuclear power plants also may have to show alternate forms of identification beginning Jan. 10 in states like Illinois, Missouri, New Mexico and Washington, which are not in compliance and did not receive an extension from DHS, according to the DHS website.

But DHS has been granting South Carolina extensions since 2008, when then-Gov. Mark Sanford sent a letter to Michael Chertoff, then-Secretary of DHS, spelling out the reasons South Carolina would not comply with the law and his concerns about it.

Chertoff accepted the letter as a request for an extension and granted one.

Then, this past October 30, South Carolina again requested an extension, which was granted on Dec. 14, Parks said.

“This extension means federal agencies may accept our credentials (driver’s licenses and IDs) for official purposes during the extension period,” she said.

Parks said the DMV is working with federal officials to ensure South Carolinians can continue to travel with their driver’s license or identification cards beyond the Oct. 16 extension.

Friday, Homeland Security gave states a timeline of when TSA would begin driver’s license restrictions. It listed South Carolina among states that would need to be compliant by Oct. 1, 2020. Other states must comply by 2018.

Jim Harper, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a public policy think tank focused on limited government, said he believes the TSA threats are an empty bluster being used as a tactic to gain states’ compliance.

The tide of public relations would turn against DHS and TSA if it began to turn away driver’s licenses, he said.

“South Carolina is one of the states that originally showed that DHS will back down,” Harper said, citing Sanford’s letter that DHS treated as a request for an extension.

Harper said REAL ID was an example of state policy migrating up to the federal level, where the feds could dictate how states run their motor vehicle departments.

Some states, like South Carolina, have cited concerns about the unfunded mandates and security issues spelled out within REAL ID, Harper said.

“It’s a classic unfunded federal mandate that they have to rejigger their driver’s license systems and their driver’s licensing policies in a variety of ways to meet the federal requirements,” he said.

And though South Carolina has been lauded in the past for the security of its driver’s license system, Harper said that security would be at risk with REAL ID.

If South Carolina were to comply, he said, its driver’s license data would be open to other states and “the security of every state’s motor vehicle database is only as strong as the weakest of every other state,” he said.

Homeland Security said this week that REAL ID does not build a national database and other states would not have access to South Carolina’s driver’s license data.

Harper called that “untruthful, false, not accurate, and incorrect.”

He cited wording in the REAL ID act, which says states must “Provide electronic access to all other States to information contained in the motor vehicle database of the State.”

That, Harper said, sounds an awful lot like a national database.