Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is illegal for the US government to create a mandatory national identity system or coerce the States into creating one. The limits of this have been pretty thoroughly tested in the US Supreme Court. Every time things like this come up, everyone asks why don't we just thing that looks like a national identity system to fix the issue, as if that never occurred to anyone in Congress. This is why: it violates the Cons…
> everyone asks why don't we just thing that looks like a national identity system Aren't passports national/federal identity systems?
The question is whether the U.S. federal government can require all U.S. residents to get, carry, and provide a national form of identification. To my knowledge it cannot, but I’m not handy with a case citation to prove it. Watching the rest of this thread to see what people turn up.
Note that Social Security numbers are explicitly not intended to be such IDs, although many services do use SSN as a key to distinguish people from one another.