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Crime Bill Passage a Crime

No wonder they call it a “crime bill.” What the Congress has done to the North Carolina Public Records Law ought to be a felony.

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 — yes, the same one that had political tempers flaring and partisan rhetoric flowing through the dog days of August — includes five pages of ungrammatical gobbledygook known variously as “the Boxer/Moran bill” or “the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act of 1994,” the net effect of which is to repeal the North Carolina Public Records Law with respect to motor vehicle and driver’s license records. As I interpret this mischievous and virtually unintelligible bit of political mayhem, state DMV officials may disclose motor vehicle and driver’s license information only for certain specified law enforcement, safety and insurance purposes. (One particularly nasty aspect of the law is that it will require DMV to hire and train a battery of inquisitors whose job will be to determine which inquiries are “legitimate.”)

Did I just hear somebody say, “Where does the Congress get the authority to repeal a law passed by the North Carolina General Assembly?”

Good question. No doubt someone, somewhere will challenge the Boxer/Moran law on those very grounds. But if someone does, I’ll bet you a penny to a Snickers bar that the federal courts, which are now dominated by Reagan and Bush appointees who accord near-total deference to the legislative branch, will uphold it. Meanwhile, we have three years in which to act, because the Driver’s Privacy Protection Act does not become effective until three years after President Clinton signs the crime bill into law.

What can we do? Well, we can lobby the Congress to repeal or modify the law. The problem with this approach is that such lobbying presumably would be done by the national media organizations (SPJ, ASNE, NAA, etc.) who — despite eloquent and forceful Congressional testimony by former NCPA president Rich Oppel — proved powerless to prevent this emasculation of state sovereignty and state public policy. Indeed, some of the national organizations apparently “signed off” on the final version of the Boxer/Moran bill and are politically estopped to complain about it.

Otherwise, our only recourse lies in what the national media organizations describe, in a fit of pure fantasy, as an “opt-out” provision. Don’t be fooled by this self-serving nomenclature. The law doesn’t say that a state may simply choose not to have its public records law affected by the crime bill. Rather, it says that a state may disclose motor vehicle or driver’s license information for purposes other than the prescribed purposes IF the state includes “clear and conspicuous” notices to that effect on all forms (such as driver’s license renewal forms) AND IF the state provides drivers and vehicle owners with a “clear and conspicuous” opportunity to prohibit such disclosures.

In other words, we have no real hope of maintaining the same degree of access to DMV records as currently provided by the North Carolina Public Records Law, and if we want to maintain ANY access we must persuade the state to adopt the notice procedures described above. That, of course, almost necessarily means that we must finance and implement a protracted and hard-fought lobbying campaign directed to DMV and to the General Assembly. If we spend the time and the money, and if we are lucky, we will end up with, at best, a partially emasculated Public Records Law.

As I said, it’s no wonder they call it a “crime bill.”