I have not said "make the gov bigger". A national ID would not increase the current bureaucracy if done right. And as I said in another thread, real ID would not be necessary if the states did not drop the ball in the first place, by doing really dumbass stuff like giving driver's licenses to illegals.
I am not going to start a flame war on who is more naive. All I am going to say is that this gov is still amenable to activism on the part of Joe Schmoe, a fresh example being the continual failure of amnesty bills last year. Amnesty did not happen because enough people phoned or faxed enough politicians to scare them. If they had not, the politicians would have gone ahead under the pressure from their elitist leaderships. And that is all there is to it - a balance of terror between fear from above and fear from below. If the pressure from below subsides, the politician will go down pressing on the common folk.
So, all the doom-and-gloom crowd that says everything is lost are just being wrong. Moreover, by failure to participate in the political process and to use all available legal tools at their disposal, they certainly leave the gov in the hands of the other side - incompetent bureaucrats and two-bit statists. Then at best what they are doing is a self-fulfilling prophecy. This attitude seems to be far too common on a number of issues and does not help matters at all.