Really!

It's nice to have some bit of good news now and again. According to a press release from the ACLU on Thursday, the state legislature of Washington

passed a bill in a landslide to block implementation of the federal REAL ID Act. The action makes Washington the fourth state to pass legislation opposing the law, joining Maine, Idaho and Arkansas.

"The overwhelming margin of today's vote shows how truly bipartisan the opposition is to REAL ID. It would threaten personal privacy, as well as create a bureaucratic nightmare to implement," said ACLU of Washington Legislative Director Jennifer Shaw.

The vote was 95-2.

Less than a month ago, when I last posted about Real ID, only two states had rejected it, although several others were moving in that direction.

Passed by Congress in 2005, the REAL ID Act requires states to produce standardized driver's licenses and to store the drivers' information in nationally connected databases - creating a de facto national ID card. ...

REAL ID has drawn opposition from organizations across the political spectrum, including the American Bar Association, the American Conservative Union, the Council of State Governments, Gun Owners of America, the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the National Conference of State Legislatures and the National Governors Association.

Not to mention both the ACLU itself and the Cato Institute. The ACLU has a scorecard of how well the proposed regulations governing Real ID, released at the start of March by the Department for the Protection of the Fatherland, deal with the concerns and objections raised by critics and officials. The unsurprising answer was "piss poorly." That report, in .pdf format, is here.