Democrat Leaders Renew Calls for National ID Card

 

THE DEMOCRATIC LEADERSHIP is at it again, proposing to “reform” illegal immigration by saddling the country with privacy-robbing, onerous identification requirements. This time, top Democrats are unveiling yet another intrusive proposal they are calling the “BELIEVE System.”

BELIEVE, which stands for “Biometric Enrollment, Locally-stored Information and Electronic Verification of Employment,” would require all legal U.S. citizens seeking jobs to possess federally issued identification that retains personal information like fingerprints or retinal scans.

The insanity of this program goes something like this: Top Democrats do not want to deal with those who break the law by entering the United States illegally, because that would be politically incorrect.

Instead, they want the rest of America—those who are here legally—to pay the price by having to keep current with yet another form of identification that will include detailed, highly personal information on it.

The truth is, “BELIEVE” is just lipstick on the same pig that was already killed in previous sessions. As early as 1993, Washington proposed a national “Health Security” ID card that would have personal information embedded on it. That proposal never made it past the discussion phase.

Then, following the Sept. 11 attacks,
Congress toyed with an idea to create a national drivers license, which would contain your Social Security number or some other unique identifier. When that never went anywhere, the mother of all national IDs was rolled out: The infamous REAL ID program of 2005.

Despite a massive public relations effort on the part of the federal government, that program was eventually killed following a huge outcry from citizens and privacy groups.

But D.C. is not going to let something like decades of failures and overwhelming resistance stop it.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) summed up how Americans have been cowed into submission through constant fear mongering on terrorism.

“The biometric identification card is a critical element here,” Durbin said. “For a long time it was resisted by many groups, but now we live in a world where we take off our shoes at the airport and pull out our identification.”

As much as many conservatives complain about the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the organization was the first out of the gate to criticize the plan.

“If the biometric national ID card provision of the draft bill becomes law,” noted an ACLU release, “every worker in America would have to be fingerprinted.”

If this is the type of “change” the Democrats want us to “believe” in, tell Congress they can keep it.

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(Issue # 20, May 19, 2010)