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 nly
a bare majority of Americans — 51 percent — support the
creation of a national identity card, according to a new poll by
Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates. This is a substantial loss
of support since the Pew Research Center found 70 percent endorsing
the concept in a survey it conducted immediately after the September
11 attacks.
Yet plenty
of warning signs remain. Westerners are only demographic group with
a majority opposing ID cards (53 percent) and senior citizens are
the only segment with a plurality against it (47 percent). Republicans
and men are evenly split on the issue, with Democrats and women
likely to favor it. Most troubling, however, may be that the poll
shows overall support jumping to 61 percent when the ID card is
described as "a measure to combat terrorism and make the use
of false identities more difficult."
If ever the
American public was primed to accept an ID card, the time is now.
A recent Washington Post survey reports that 64 percent of Americans
say they trust the federal government to do the right thing "nearly
always" or "most of the time" — the highest
level of trust recorded since 1966 and twice the level measured
just a year ago. "This is the most collective mood we've seen
in America for a long time," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake
told the New York Times. "And it's coming off one of
the most individualistic eras in American history."
The Bush administration
already has signaled through a spokesman that it does not support
the idea, though several members of Congress have embraced it and
House immigration subcommittee chairman George Gekas, a Pennsylvania
Republican, says ID cards will definitely receive consideration.
Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has said his company, a leader in databases,
would donate the software to make it happen.
Conservatives
must oppose these internal passports with vigor. They may be promoted
now as tools for combating terrorism, but their potential for abuse
is enormous. How long before the federal government also starts
tracking gun sales through them? Or auditing income-tax returns?
And don't forget the little prop President Clinton held up during
his health-care speech to Congress in 1993: a "health-security
card" that would have enabled the government's takeover of
a whole industry.
Terrorism is
obviously worth fighting, but ID cards aren't the only way to do
it or even the best way.
(Yesterday,
NRO
published a symposium on ID cards. And one of your correspondents,
in a previous life, co-authored
an assessment of ID cards for the Cato Institute.)
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