The Bush administration has no shortage of ideas. Unfortunately, many of them are bad ones. Under the direction of Attorney General John Ashcroft, whom NAACP Board Chair Julian Bond dubbed “J. Edgar Ashcroft” because of his Hoover-like obsession with prying into the personal lives of Americans, the administration had already launched a broad attack on our civil liberties.

But that wasn’t enough. So members of the administration came up with the not-so-bright idea—actually, it was dimwitted—of inaugurating a national program that encourages Americans to spy on one another and report it to Uncle Sam. Washington wouldn’t be Washington without an acronym that that fell out of bowl of alphabet soup. So the would-be Secretary of Peeping Toms came up with TIPS: Terrorism Information and Prevention System.

Under the pilot program that was to begin in August, certain citizens—mail carriers, truckers, utility employees and others whose jobs provide them a glimpse into people’s personal lives—would be urged to report suspicious activity directly to the U.S. Justice Department. The department would, in turn, share their database with local and state authorities.

This is such a bad idea that liberals and conservatives united to oppose it. That they could come together anytime is quite a feat. That they could unite in an election year is a miracle.

The Boston Globe’s liberal editorial page, under the heading, “Ashcroft vs. Americans,” observed: “Ashcroft’s informant corps is a vile idea not merely because it violates civil liberties in a narrow legal sense or because it will sabotage genuine efforts to prevent terrorism by overloading law enforcement officials with irrelevant reports about Americans who have nothing to do with terrorists. Operation TIPS should be stopped because it is utterly anti-American. It would give Stalin and the KGB a delayed triumph in the Cold War—in the name of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.”

Robert A. Levy, writing for the conservative “National Review” observed, “If the media accounts are to be believed, TIPS is crafted to transform us into a nation of meddlers, busybodies, and snoops—each of us spying on the rest.” He continues, “…We will soon have meter readers entering our homes, supposedly to do what we expect them to do, then rummaging around our private residences only to file a report with the Justice Department about anything them deem questionable.

“If police officers wanted to do the same thing, they’d have to convince a judge or magistrate that there was probable cause to issue a search warrant. TIPS may not raise Fourth Amendment concerns, but it comes pretty close.”

House Majority Leader Dick Armey, a staunch supporter of Bush, gave the administration a tip—forget about it. In his markup of legislation creating a Homeland Security Department, the chairman of the House Select Committee on Homeland Security explicitly prohibited the Department of Justice from initiating TIPS. It also took another step, requiring the creation of a privacy officer at the proposed department.

In the process of creating what Republicans say they loathe, another level of bureaucracy, Armey opposed another bad idea advanced by the Bush administration, one that would have created national identification cards. Bush had favored either nationalizing driver’s licenses or creating a national ID card. The 216-page bill, sponsored by Armey, a conservative Republican from Bush’s home state, also prohibits the creation of the national cards or uniform driver’s licenses. “Authority to design and issue these cards shall remain with the states,” Armey declared.

Hold on, there’s more.

The latest dumb idea to come out of the White House is the prospect of allowing the U.S. Army to assume a role in domestic law enforcement. The “Posse Comitatus Act,” passed during the Reconstruction Era, forbids the Army from participating in arrests, searches and seizure of property within domestic borders. However, the Coast Guard and the National Guard can be mobilized by governors in specific situations.

“We need to be talking about military assets in anticipation of a crisis event,” Homeland security chief Tom Ridge said in an interview with “Fox News Sunday.” Ridge said, “And clearly, if you’re talking about using the military, then you should have a discussion about posse comitatus.”

However, Sen. Carl Levin, [D-Mich.] chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said the statue that has placed restrictions on the use of the military in domestic matters has served the country well.

On CNN’s “Late Edition,” he explained, “It’s kept the military out of law enforcement, out of arresting people except in the most unusual emergency situations—like a riot or after some kind of a disaster, where they have to protect against looting.”

At the rate we’re going, Bush’s next proposal might be that we declare the Constitution unconstitutional. Hey, don’t laugh. No one thought he’d come up with this many bad ideas in such a short period in office. When it comes to bad ideas, there seems to be no end.