While we've covered it here, the attempt by Congress to defer implementation of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative has gotten surprisingly little attention. The WHTI requires all citizens of the United States, Canada, Mexico, and Bermuda to have a passport or other accepted ID that establishes the bearer’s identity and nationality, to enter or depart the United States from within the Western Hemisphere.

Yesterday DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff announced that while Congress has blocked full implementation of the initiative, the administration is narrowing the range of documents that can be used to gain entry at land ports, and reducing the number of cases in which an individual can simply assert citizenship to enter without ID:

As you also know, Congress has mandated a delay of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative full implementation until June of 2009. But we are, nevertheless, in the intervening time taking some reasonable and very important measures to eliminate what I consider to be unacceptable vulnerabilities in our land border. And that includes eliminating oral declarations in all but extraordinary circumstances, and reducing the number of documents that will be accepted at the border.

The Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative fulfills one of the recommendations of the 9/11 commission. The commission noted that it's impossible to know who is entering the United States when so many forms of identification are accepted for entry, with most being easy to fake. Given that Congressional leaders cite implementation of the 9/11 Commission recommendations as one of their signature achievements of 2007, it's stunning that they moved to block full implementation of the initiative.

Chertoff has spoken in the past on the problem and the need for reform:

First of all, individuals can orally assert their U.S. citizenship. That means basically saying, hi, I’m a U.S. citizen, and in many cases we allow that to be sufficient unless the agent becomes suspicious. And even when a Customs and Border Protection officer asks for a document, these same individuals can present up to 8,000 different forms of travel documents from birth certificates to identification cards to drivers’ licenses at our land and seaports of entry...

It's simply incredible that more than six years after the 9/11 attacks, anyone can enter the U.S. by asserting that he or she is a citizen, and fooling a border guard. It's even more incredible that Congress has attempted to block the administration from remedying this--when they ought to be screaming for it to be fixed more quickly. The reform that DHS is about to implement is a step in the right direction, at least.