State Department weighs handing over Americans' passports, calls it protecting Americans' data.

…(cont) On September 2nd, before any of this reached a judge, the reporting was that Homeland Security had hundreds of agents going through state voter rolls, under a program with its own name inside the department: the Unlawful Voter Initiative. I wrote the name down because it's the kind of name a person gives a thing before they know what the thing is going to find.

On September 5th, an appeals court kept its block in place on the federal tool that checks a voter's citizenship by pulling Social Security records against state rolls. Blocked, I wrote, and underlined it once.

On September 8th, the Justice Department went over that court's head and asked the Supreme Court to lift the block, on a version of the same tool the administration had modified to link Social Security numbers directly to citizenship status.

On September 14th — a different case, a different filing, the mail ballots this time rather than the citizenship tool — the Supreme Court declined to restore the administration's plan to restrict mail-in voting for these midterms. No, again.

Sometime after that the citizenship tool got cleared to proceed for the same midterms the mail plan is still locked out of. One request went through. The other kept failing.

And today the State Department is weighing whether to hand over passport records too, to be checked against the same rolls, in the department's own words, in a way that "protects Americans' data, deters fraud and supports the integrity of U.S. citizenship." Is a passport the fourth item this file has reached for, after the voter rolls, the Social Security numbers, and the mail ballots themselves?

I stood in a bank line last week behind a man who'd brought one form of ID to cash a check that needed two. The teller wasn't unreasonable about it, she just couldn't move forward on one. I think about that line every time I read what these agencies are asking each other for lately. The voter rolls weren't enough on their own. Then it was the Social Security numbers. Now it's whether a passport should go in the folder too — the document a person already carries to prove they're a citizen, being asked to prove it again, to a different office, for a different file.

The dog doesn't care about any of this, for what it's worth, she just wants the leash off the porch hook, and some mornings I envy how short her list of documents is.

Before you go — one more line I marked. The State Department's own goal, again: to protect data, deter fraud, support the integrity of citizenship. Nowhere in the notebook do I have a fraud number to go with it, just the record of what this Court has done with these requests so far. Read it back in order and it comes out the same way it went in: no, no, yes — and now a fourth ask, from an administration that's already been told no twice.