One thing you have to give the Geheimstaatspolizei credit for is being persistent in their efforts to have all Americans carry ID matching federal specs.
We’ve known for quite a while that if you didn’t possess (either by choice or by your state’s opting out) a REAL ID-compliant drivers license, you’d have trouble entering federal buildings and you’d be subject to the extra-special, extra-friendly secondary screening by TSA agents when flying.
However, Homeland Insecurity has upped the ante. From Threat Level:
Currently individuals who want to buy over-the-counter decongestants containing pseudo-ephedrine have to show I.D. to a pharmacy clerk, sign a log sheet and are limited in the amount they can purchase. The rules—pushed heavily by California Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, are intended to make it harder for meth labs to get pseudo-ephedrine to cook into full-blown methamphetamines. They were made law in the 2006 re-authorization of the Patriot Act.
Stewart Baker, the assistant director for policy at Homeland Security and a longtime needler of privacy groups, suggested on Wednesday that the federal law could be tweaked to require controversial REAL ID identification cards, according to News.com.[...]
The Cato Institutes’s Jim Harper interprets Baker’s statement to mean a REAL ID would be necessary for any prescription. I don’t see that in the report on Baker’s remark, but certainly the F in FDA stands for Federal. The feds probably could do this, but from a health standpoint it would be a nightmare. No REAL ID, no birth control, no antibiotics, no insulin. How many dead Americans are these rules going to be worth?