By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

A measure that would require states to issue uniform driver’s licenses passed 261 to 161 in the U.S. House on Thursday.

Rep. Mike Michaud, D-Maine, who opposed the bill, called it “redundant.”

“The 9/11 Recommendations Implementation Act that I supported last year provided strong new protections that addressed all of the issues that today’s bill was supposed to address,” Michaud said from Washington after the vote.

Sponsored by Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., the legislation approved Thursday is linked by conservatives to national security and by liberals to a national identification card system.

It may not survive in the Senate, if it makes it there at all. Right now there’s no similar bill on file in the upper chamber.

Some of Sensenbrenner’s proposals were earlier rejected when the upper chamber approved the Intelligence Reform Act, which Maine Sen. Susan Collins championed.

And that act, said Doug Dunbar, Maine’s assistant secretary of state, calls for creation of a task force to examine license issues and to recommend ways for the states to ratchet up security measures.

Maine already practices two: Digital photos of license holders and bar codes containing information unique to licensees.

Dunbar said Collins has nominated Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap to serve on the Intelligence Reform Act task force.

“We intend to weigh in either way,” Dunbar said. Maine’s status as both a smaller rural state and an international border state gives it perspectives to offer that other states don’t have, he noted.

Citing the task force’s 18-month time frame to draft proposals, Dunbar said any change in Maine’s driver’s licenses linked to federal measures probably is at least a couple of years off.

One of Sensenbrenner’s license proposals would require states to adopt security measures to prevent counterfeiting. It’s aimed primarily at preventing terrorists from using licenses as IDs needed to board airliners, although advocates also claim it would help to halt identity theft.

Not all states are waiting to act. Last year, Tennessee approved a two-tier licensing plan that gives residents one form of license, which is also good as an ID, but limits aliens to a certificate that’s good for driving purposes only.

And in October, Massachusetts unveiled a first-in-the-nation, tamper-resistant license.

“In Massachusetts,” said its governor, Mitt Romney, “a license to drive shouldn’t become a license to steal or commit mayhem.”

The new Bay State license includes a hologram-like feature that displays unique characteristics when viewed from various angles. It also has digital watermarks, a digital photo of the holder with printing over it, a translucent ghost picture and complex gradient background that makes duplication more difficult.

Sensenbrenner’s bill has another provision that’s been controversial. He would ban states from issuing licenses to illegal immigrants if the federal government accepts licenses as a form of identification. Now, Department of Homeland Security agents screening airline passengers require driver’s licenses as IDs.

Such measures will “make America safer and more secure,” said Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., the House Homeland Security Committee chairman.

“Denying undocumented immigrants driver’s licenses could actually make us less safe,” said Ralph Neas and Marge Baker, the president and the director of the liberal group called People for the American Way. The two wrote a letter to Congress opposing the Real ID Act.

They said an estimated 9 million to 11 million undocumented immigrants drive the nation’s roads daily and will continue to, with or without a license.

“Despite claims by its sponsors,” they said, the act “fails to improve national security.” Provisions, they continued, would “undermine national security by pushing people into the shadows and fueling an increase in fraudulent identification documents.”

Neas and Baker said that because Sensenbrenner’s bill would repeal some existing ID standards related to driver’s licenses, it also “creates the specter of a national ID card.”

It “would essentially trump states’ rights to set their own verification standards, replacing them with a single specific national standard.”

And those rights are important, noted Antonia Ferrier, the spokeswoman for U.S. Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine.

She said that if a companion measure surfaces in the Senate, Snowe “would look to balance state’s rights against national security needs.”

Collins, also a Republican, is taking a wait-and-see attitude.

Elissa Canlas Davidson, her spokeswoman, noted the bill “just passed the House today, and companion legislation has not been introduced in the Senate, so we have not looked at the legislation yet.”