House republicans should have revoked the security clearance of the 51 former intelligence officials the moment they got the gavel.
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) November 16, 2024
One of the things I find frustrating and even annoying on both the left and the right is is that people have a real problem with finding out how things actually work. Today’s example is in security clearance and classification. We have above a demand that House Republicans revoke the security clearance of the Infamous 51 — the 51 “National Security Experts” who published a letter insisting that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the earmarks of a Russian disinformation operation.
Of course, we know now that not only was it real, and was eventually used in court in one of the Hunter Biden prosecutions, but the FBI, CIA, etc. knew it was real long before it became public. And the “all the earmarks” line was weasel-worded to ensure they couldn’t actually be proven to have lied, because lying, of course, would be wrong.
And yeah, that has a lot of “of course” carrying a whole lot of water.
A few days ago, I suggested this in my “What Comes Next” article:
Terminate all the security clearances for everyone who holds a clearance after leaving government. Make them re-apply. But the [Infamous] Famous 51 should be told not to bother. And seriously consider charging them under the Espionage Act.”
I make a point of repeating all this because of what I’m going to say next.
The reason the House Republicans don’t terminate those security clearances is because they can’t.
To understand why the House Republicans can’t just pull the clearances of the Infamous 51, we need to look at where clearances come from and how they’re administered.
It all derives from Executive Order 13526. The magic there is in the phrase “executive order.” While the punishment for violating classification is established by law (see 18 USC 792-798), the classification itself is established by the authority of the president alone. You may recall that this was an issue in the now-aborted classified documents case against Trump, which depended on the spurious assertion that Trump couldn’t declassify what he wanted.
Okay, this is an over-simplification, since nuclear secrets are done by law by the Department of Energy , but that’s not what we’re talking about here.
The point here is that this is a separation of powers issue: the House can’t overrule the President. (If you think this is bad, remember the Lesson of Robespierre: if they can do it for you, they can do it to you. What if the Democrats retake the House in 2026?)
It’s something I wish people gave at least a moment’s thought: we have a separation of powers, and in general, we have the whole structure of the three official components of the United States government, specifically because we want to make it hard for one part of the government to dominate the others.
We’ve let that slip, which is how the Executive Branch has come to have the “Deep State” become an effective unelected fourth branch. Trump was elected to take back the control, and take responsibility, of the Executive Branch.
Let’s not undercut that.
