ROGER SIMON: Eighty House Republicans Vote for More Government Spying.

Welcome to Stasi America!

I used to think that cry was excessive, was an unrestrained accusation of some semi-existent phenomenon called the alt-right. The East German Stasi, after all, topped even the KGB when it came to intruding on the private lives of citizens, fundamentally destroying the individual at the hands of the state.

No longer.

Our lack of privacy, not to mention the increased ability of the government to spy on us, has been ratified by eighty—count ‘em eighty—House Republicans, including minority leader Kevin McCarthy (who wants us to see him as a viable replacement of, an actual savior from, Nancy Pelosi) and Burgess Owens of all people (Et tu, Burgess? Who can we rely on now?)

What these GOP members of what seems more and more like the People’s Congress of Cambodia under Pol Pot have voted for en masse, joining one hundred percent of the Democrats (something suspicious right there), is a bill to fund a Federal Vaccination Database.

Known as the Immunization Infrastructure Act (H. R. 550), this baby would provide $400 million of your dollars and mine for an “immunization system data modernization and expansion” of “a confidential, population-based, computerized database that records immunization doses administered by any health care provider to persons within the geographic area covered by that database.”

In other words, it’s a handy way to get the “wrong” people fired, ostracized or whatever, while getting their children kicked out of school.

The Lives of Others was never meant to be a how-to guide for good government.