How to stop national ID card

Unlike most businesses, a specific charter from the state or Federal government is required before a corporation or other entity may engage in the business of banking. The Federal government became involved in chartering banks in 1862 when the Lincoln Administration, in part as a wartime measure, established a national banking charter in order to promote more stable national bank notes replacing the state bank notes that fluctuated in value.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution grants Congress the authority to "To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin." The chartering of national banks as a means of currency regulation might be interpreted as an exercise of this authority. However, in 1913, the Federal Reserve System was established and given the power to regulate the supply of money and credit, supplanting the old National bank system. Despite the elimination of the original justification for national banks, they remained in existence and new national banks have been chartered to this very day.

As for Federal deposit insurance, such as offered by the FDIC and the NCUA, there is no Constitutional justification for these agencies. Article I, Section 8 refers to the minting and valuation of coin. It says nothing about deposit insurance. Both the Comptroller of the Currency and the various State bank regulators require the obtainment of Federal deposit insurance, making its use and resultant supervision by the FDIC mandatory. There is simply no Constitutional warrant for the numerous business and consumer regulations imposed by the FDIC and other Federal banking authorities. The requirement for mandatory IDs to engage in banking transactions is yet another regulation unsupported by the Constitution.

As for the concept of a national ID, again there is no Constitutional justification therefor. The "interstate commerce" clause of the Constitution, also in Section I, Article 8, had as its original intent the prohibition of tariffs or other trade barriers to be imposed by the states. It was never meant to be a means by which the Feds can intrude on a myriad of areas, such as banking, medicine, food production, management/labor relations, etc.

Somehow this nation fought two world wars and major conflicts in Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait without resorting to national ID cards or interfering with freedom of travel. (Of course, young men of military age were routinely questioned if not in uniform, but the rest of the population was not subject to the sort of restrictions that have already been or are proposed to be imposed.}

America is supposed to be a nation of laws, not men. We should respect the Constitution as the Framers intended under the doctrine of original intent and abandon the "living document" farce that has led to a massive expansion of governmental authority starting in earnest with the New Deal.

Your constitutional argument is well reasoned.

I do not know enough about the evolution of constitutional law to either agree or disagree with your conclusion about banking. But I do grant that the constitution should be strictly interpreted. Provision was made for changes as needed, but not by the judiciary.

The larger picture is that our founders designed laws to protect us from the abuse of governmental authority that they had experienced firsthand.

The constitution is an amazing document, but it is not infallible. That is why it can be changed.

If a perfect law could make the subjects of it perfect, then the Law of Moses would have done that.

There are abuses of power today that were unthinkable at the time of our nation's birth: abortion, homosexual marriage, prohibitions against the display of the ten commandments, against prayer in public schools, against teaching the Bible in public schools.

Further, technology has changed the way we live to such a degree that it would have been impossible to envision how to write the relevant laws we have today.

Two-hundred years ago, it might have been possible to rely on communities to verify the identities of its members. This is not possible today. We do not know the people who live around us well enough.

The ability to verify that a person is who they claim to be is essential to the wellbeing of our society.

I see making national standards for drivers' licenses as the simplest, least intrusive way to do this.

No one has to get this type of identification. It is just very inconvenient to live without.

To me, if we do not take this path, then the only safe alternative is to abandon technology. Do not drive. Do not fly. Go to cash only transactions. Do not use telephones.

It seems the use of technology is the main reason identification has become so important.

Government chartered central banks are nothing new. The Bank of England dates to 1692, for example. Few governments have left the issue of money and credit alone even when medicine, labor practices, agriculture, etc., were left wholly to the private sector. Foreign trade is another area where governments have exercised their authority. Tariffs were used to protect American products from the time of George Washington. In fact, the issue of tariff policy was a major factor behind the Southern secession of 1861.

If, as you say, the Constitution is to be interpreted strictly, any expansion of powers must be accomplished through amending the document, as has been done 27 times since the founding of the Republic. You are also correct in your criticism of the power of judicial review. The worst abusers of this power were the Warren and Burger Supreme Courts. However, the germ of this power was planted by John Marshall, when he asserted the authority of the Supreme Court to declare acts of Congress unconstitutional in Marbury v. Madison. Although Congress is granted the power to establish the jurisdiction of Federal courts in the Constitution, it has never been exercised. By simply limiting the Federal courts from ruling in the areas of marriage and domestic relationships, the Congress could eliminate the possibility that the Supreme Court may at some point require all states to issue marriage licenses to homosexuals.

Returning to the issue of national ID cards, why were these not required in past conflicts? Money could be, and was, transferred by Soviet, Red Chinese, Nazi, and Japanese agents into the United States. Past generations of lawmen relied upon focusing on people known to be associated with the enemy or opposed to the government, such as the IWW and anarchist groups in World War I, the German-American Bund and homegrown fascists in World War II, and Communists, fellow travelers, and the New Left in the Cold War era (including Korea and Vietnam). These techniques worked, inasmuch as sabotage was held to a minimum and radical Left wingers like the Weathermen were not able to succeed in their terror campaign.

The enemy today is as identifiable as those of the past by both their religion and their ethnicity. However, political correctness dictates that we not focus on those who are more probably our enemies, but rather in harassing blonde teenaged girls named Knudsen or 80 year old nuns at airports. Our rulers instead insist on increasing scrutiny over the entire population rather than using what has worked in past eras.

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