[Sabinus]

Would you applaud the Trump White House having direct and unsupervised access to your prescriptions, your voter registration, your passport and biometrics, and every federal login?

And any hint of compliance with privacy, disclosure and oversight laws will come only after multiple years and multiple lawsuits, if ever.

[JuniperMesos]

Does the federal government not already have access to those things? I enter my phone number in at the pharmacy when I pick up my federally-controlled ADHD medication because the law demands I do so in order to prevent abuse of that medication. My passport and the associated biometrics are themselves a federal government document, the white house (regardless of who is president at any given time) is the entity that controls the bureaucracy I gave my biometrics to in order to get the passport. Same with the federal websites I log in into.

Voter registration is a state, rather than a federal, concern under the present constitutional order (barring the various federal civil rights laws and federal court decisions based on them that regulate how states can do voter registration). But I don't particularly care if the government that knows the details of my voter registration is the one governing 40 million people in California, or 330 million people in the whole united states - both are equally faceless gigantic bureaucracies to me.

Indeed, I think it would be reasonable for voting to be a federal rather than a state responsibility, precisely because in modern US elections every voter has an interest in the proper voting and registration procedures being followed for all voters in the US, including those in other states. It would probably require a constitutional amendment to fully realize this goal, but certainly we've amended the constitution before.

[Terr_]

> Does the federal government not already have access to those things?

The president is not the government, the properties of the whole are not the properties of a part. We do not want a system where they have direct un-audited and law-ignoring access to all those things.

_____

The nearby school has temporary custody of your child for most workdays, and can direct the child to be in certain rooms or watch certain videos.

Now the new Principal claims they have the authority to direct your child to their house during recess, to watch "educational videos" in their bedroom.

Your childless neighbor says "No big deal, the school could already do that anyway and he's already in charge."

Do you agree with that neighbor, or is something very wrong with how they're approaching the issue?