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Update on the continuing dramatic saga of DOGE: apparently the Department of Education no longer exists.
Now this could be a sensationalist media headline, but if not I am shocked that the DOGE team and Trump's cadre et al are going this hard, this fast. They must basically be saying they're going to get a ton of legal challenges anyway, so they might as well do as much as possible and keep up the momentum, destroying everything before the dust clears. It's a bold strategy, and frankly as a spectator it's incredibly exciting, I must admit!
Curious for people's thoughts on the Dept of Education getting shut down? Personally I think it's a good thing - our education system has had terrible outcomes with no accountability for far too long.
In other related news, FEMA send $59 Million dollars to house immigrants in luxury hotels in NYC last week, and Social Security has been sending money to dozens of people over 150 years old, among other issues like the system for SSNs not being re-duplicated.
I must admit Musk has really invigorated the news coming from the US. My wildest ideas of how Trump could gut DoE that I wrote on The Motte no longer look so far-fetched. Elon is driving a bulldozer through every Chesterton's fence he can find in D.C.
If he manages to roll out a biometric national ID card to digitize access to government benefits before the end of Trump's term I'll start a petition to make his position of the man behind the curtain permanent.
Hmmm I personally would hate this, why are you so for it?
And yes I agree, I appreciate that a politician who got elected on downsizing the system is ACTUALLY doing that for a change. It's incredibly refreshing.
Why would you hate it? The only downside I can conceive are trivial relative to benefits.
First, that isn't something the federal government is allowed to do per the Constitution. So it's up to the states. Second, I don't want even the states accelerating the panopticon by incorporating all our biometrics into it. I don't know what benefits you have in mind, but I can't think of any which are not dwarfed by that massive cost.
The federal government can do anything necessary and proper to enforcing the immigration laws (as long is it doesn't violate the Bill of Rights).
Since universal ID is, in fact, required for effective in-country enforcement of immigration laws, this seems like an easily winnable legal argument.
That's an opinion, not a fact. Not saying we should digress into debating that point, but it's definitely not a factual one.
Yeah probably. The federal government has been winning far worse legal arguments to expand its power since Wickard v Filburn. But that doesn't change my opinion that these things are a blatantly unconstitutional use of power, and that the government shouldn't have it.
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It also isn't allowed to regulate the drinking age, but it does. It just has to extend the REAL ID provisions so one must have a compliant ID from the moment of birth till death. Or say maintaining a database of IDs is required for regulating interstate commerce.
Yes, I am aware that the federal government regularly and flagrantly violates the Constitution. That doesn't mean I'm going to simply accept more violations. We should both refuse to allow new violations and roll back the ones which exist.
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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.
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The State already is a panopticon. The only fly in the ointment is that it's only a panopticon for members of society who are well-integrated into the economy, own assets, and generally "have something to lose."
This extends the panopticon to those who have nothing to lose. So we lose the anarcho part of anarchotyranny. Perhaps losing the tyranny part instead would be better, but throwing out the rulebook altogether seems a bigger lift than just ensuring it's applied universally.
This is undoubtedly true. But it seems to me that it's better to fight for that than to apply the tyranny to everyone (which is what you seem to be in favor of, correct me if I'm wrong).
I live in a city where the government will punish you more (up to putting a lien on your house and, if you don't pay the rapidly accumulating fines, appropriating it) if you change your windows to be double-paned without getting the appropriate permit than if you regularly go to elementary schools, expose yourself, and masturbate to the children. And god forbid if a taxpaying resident decides to perform any vigilante activism against the public masturbator. And, of course, the chronic masturbator can throw a rock through your window, and if you don't respond appropriately and request permission to fix it through the city channels, the same appropriation process begins.
This colors my views.
Is there some method for preventing you from wearing a mask and beating the vagrant senseless with a baseball bat? The police are unlikely to investigate this particularly beyond just declaring it a fight between bums, if he reports it at all. Is there 24/7 surveillance to stop you from just hiring a local Mexican to change the windows when the city isn't looking, and simply not telling anyone you did?
At a certain level, respectable and polite people make it easy to enforce laws unevenly against them.
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It being an informal panopticon is still better than a formalized system, imo. It is about dignity and what our society is willing to do to its citizens in the light of day.
If character is what you are in the dark, is government what everyone is in the dark?
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