“Irish Democracy” is Alive and Well and Living in America!: Instapundit

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds highlights three
recent examples of “Irish Democracy” (massive, passive resistance
to governmental dictates and rules) over at
USA Today. “America’s ruling class has been experiencing
more pushback than usual lately. It just might be a harbinger of
things to come,” he writes. Among the cases are the FCC’s spiking
of its “Critical Information Needs” study and gunowners in
Connecticut ignoring new registration rules (Instapundit links to
Reason’s own J.D. Tuccille on this score). And then there’s the
Department of Homeland Security’s withdrawal from creating a
national license plate registry:

The DHS put out a bid request for a system that would
have gone national, letting the federal government track millions
of people’s comings and goings just as it tracks data about every
phone call we make. But the proposal was
suddenly withdrawnlast week, with the unconvincing explanation
that it was all a mistake. I’m inclined to agree
withTechDirt’s Tim Cushing, who wrote: “The most
plausible explanation is that someone up top at the DHS or ICE
suddenly realized that publicly calling for bids on a nationwide
surveillance system while nationwide surveillance systems are being
hotly debated was … a horrible idea.”

Read the whole col.

Reynolds talked about related stuff in his excellent 2006 book,

An Army of Davids.