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As much as I sympathize with this point of view, Mr Filburn, given the legal developments over last 100 years, I can scarcely think that national ID cards is the most advantageous location to pick this battle.
What is meaningfully changed in your life by state learning your biometrics? What kind of realistic nightmare scenarios are prevented by preventing Feds from issuing national biometric IDs? I really cannot think of any.
Improving elections integrity, for one thing.
Anyway, I really disagree that there is massive cost here, and I think you are not doing a good job articulating it. Consider, for example, other countries that do have national ID systems on top of very comprehensive census registries. This covers almost the entire Europe, for example. To the extent these countries are controlling panopticons (which, to be sure, they to a large extent are when compared to US), I cannot think of any aspects of that panopticon that would be meaningfully relaxed by making their population registries less comprehensive, or their ID systems less centralized. I’d be happy to hear concrete counterexamples, if you can think of any.
Disparate impact doctrine would like a word. How would this be anything other than a bludgeon against the outgroup in either direction, depending on who has the billy club in hand?
First, disparate impact doctrine has nothing to do with it. At best you could argue that it’s related to equal protection.
More importantly, this is a fully general arguments against any laws. Why prohibit theft if it’s just a bludgeon when the your political opponents are the ones controlling law enforcement?
It's a fully general argument that usually only gets deployed in one direction. I'm happy to see how the gander likes it.
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I am certainly aware that the federal government has been using the Constitution as so much toilet paper for the last 100 years. But I don't see why that means one should not raise the objection. We can't get back to following the Constitution by adding more violations to the pile
As far as the rest goes, I appreciate that I haven't said much to convince you. But unfortunately, I don't know what else I can say. The idea of having biometric IDs issued by the government (federal or state, for that matter) is something I find to be deeply disturbing and corrosive to freedom. By comparison, having less election fraud doesn't really register as a meaningful benefit. I like election security well enough, but I like not giving powers to the government far more. I can definitely imagine that the situation is reversed for you, which means... we simply prioritize different things, and I don't know that one can resolve that with debate. Certainly I'm not anywhere near a talented enough writer for that, though I wish I were.
What would help is if you actually articulated how exactly national ID cards give government more power over you, relative to status quo. You claim this, but this is far from obvious to me.
Easy! First, let's inroduce a national artifact that everyone "should" have. Next, let's add penalty modifiers to civilian life for not carrying said artifact. Finally, since this isn't legally mandated (nor guaranteed), start imposing conditions for revokation.
I get that "let's not turn into Europe" is a thing, but there's at least one New World nation that has a wide variety of ID cards (from various levels of government) and doesn't have a problem with this.
Canada doesn't have a national ID card (the SIN doesn't really qualify, nor does the birth certificate or the passport), thus not being able to answer "papers, please" isn't a crime here. None of the various government-issued IDs really have anything to do with biometrics, either, besides a general description of your person (including whether you're human or subhuman, useful when it isn't physically obvious, and lots of these ID cards are issued to subhumans for a variety of reasons anyway).
When you go to deal with the Federal government (for instance, when voting), Provincial IDs are acceptable.
It doesn't, and shouldn't, need to be anything fancier than that. Forging these cards generally isn't a problem since the advent of cellular networks and general anti-forging techniques, and the biggest market for these cards is subhumans who require an ID stating they're a real human being anyway.
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This argument proves too much. It’s not an argument specifically against federal ID cards, but against any and all ID cards, including state issued ones. Given that none of this is a problem with state issued IDs, I don’t find this vision very likely.
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