This is the Cano Daily Podcast for Thursday, January 21st, 2016.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Department of Homeland Security has again backed away from a deadline for compliance with the Real ID Act, a national ID system

attached to state-issued IDs.

Cato Institute Senior Fellow Jim Harper argues that as long as states keep pushing back, the threats from the feds will likely

remain toothless.

The Real ID Act is a national ID law passed in May of 2005 with a May 2008 deadline at which time all the states

departments of motor vehicles were supposed to begin issuing

national IDs to drivers. The deadline came and went without compliance in any state and in fact

across the country states rejected real ID and what I call the real ID

rebellion, red states, blue states, all different regions of the country.

And since that time, the Department of Homeland Security has continually kicked back deadlines.

There's a long and complicated tale of their deadlines. There's a long and complicated tale of their deadlines, but three and four times

they've run through deadlines, and states have basically backed down the federal government

on this one.

In the fall of last year 2015 DHS began making noises

about enforcing for real this time and over the course of the fall and

especially as the new year came about people got really

worried that DHS was going to start turning people away at airports and it came to be

the rumor that January 1 2016 was the date and people were going to be rejected at TSA

checkpoints from flying because they presented IDs from states that were on the wrong

side of the Department of Homeland Security.

...