The Republicans' Really, Really Big Government
The White House wants
colleges to spend an estimated $7 billion to make it easier for the government to spy on e-mail....even though the federal government has apparently never asked for a wiretap on a university's e-mail, and, since it has the legal right to do so, could, with relative ease.
One imagines that there are other ways to spend that $7 billion which would a) make the country safer and b) avoid enormously increasing the authoritarian nature of the federal government, something Republicans used to care about, before they ran it.
Moreover, back when Bill Clinton was president, this is the kind of thing that Republicans used to call an "unfunded mandate," an order by the federal government whose cost was simply imposed upon the states. At they time, they were justifiably upset about such mandates.
