At some point, you’re going to need Real ID. Getting it can be a real pain | Opinion

Franz Kafka was an Austro-Hungarian author of the early 20th century who made his living writing fictional stories about inaccessible government bureaucracies doing inexplicable things for no good reason.

If he were alive today and living in Kansas, he’d be writing nonfiction. And he’d be writing about Real ID.

Congress, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Kansas Department of Revenue have taken the process of getting identification to a whole new level of hurdles and hoops, without really enhancing the security of our IDs — or our country.

My own journey toward Real ID began in 2019.

I went to the family safe deposit box and gathered my birth certificate and Social Security card. But when I got to the DMV, they wouldn’t accept my birth certificate.

I had the “short form.” The state wanted the “long form.”

Now I know how Barack Obama felt when Donald Trump and others questioned his citizenship and wouldn’t take the short form for an answer.

Obama and I are about the same age and were born in a time before Xerox machines and scanners. In the 1960s, long-form birth certificates were kept in a sacred vault at the state and you never even saw one, much less had a copy.

My “Certificate of Birth” isn’t one of those kitchy-koo cute documents hospitals used to give out.

It’s an official record, hand-typed and issued to my parents by the state. It attests to when and where I was born, gives the file location of the original document, and was hand signed and embossed with a seal reading, “State Department of Public Health, Phoenix, Arizona.”

It worked for everything I’d ever needed a birth certificate for. But not for Real ID.

Real ID was born in response to the 9/11 attacks and everybody, myself included, agreed that a more secure ID taking advantage of modern technology would be a good thing for everybody except terrorists.

But since then, it’s been a study in governmental ineptitude.

Congress passed the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act in 2004 to set up an expert commission to figure out the best way to upgrade ID. A year later, they got impatient, repealed that and passed the Real ID Act of 2005, which was so costly and cumbersome that 25 states actually passed laws refusing to comply.

The deadline for implementing Real ID has been delayed so many times I’ve lost count.

The current deadline is May 3 of next year.

The only reason I’m getting one now is my driver’s license is about to expire and if I don’t replace it with Real ID, I won’t be able to board a commercial aircraft eight months from now, unless the deadline is extended again.

To get my long-form birth certificate from Arizona, I had to make the request through a private company contracted to the state and pay $32.95.

They pay $20 of that to a government office to print out a document that’s in the agency’s computer; the contractor snail mails it to you; you then hand carry it to another government office; they scan it into their computer and then finally they snail mail you your Real ID.

If that doesn’t seem absurd enough, here’s the kicker: The only document I had to provide to get the required long-form birth certificate was a photograph of my current Kansas driver’s license. So in reality, Real ID isn’t really any more real than the presumably unreal ID I’ve been carrying in my wallet for the last 24 years.

The 9/11 attacks were 21 years ago. On Sunday, babies born that day will be old enough to drink and smoke in Kansas and to smoke weed in Colorado.

Meanwhile, two wars on terrorism later, we’re still piddling around in the bureaucratic quagmire that is Real ID.

In the words of Sen. Joseph Lieberman, “I always kick myself when I say I told you so, but I regret to say that I am not surprised we are here today.” He said that at a hearing on Real ID’s failures. It was in 2009.

Franz Kafka, where are you when we need you?