When courage and principle come from someplace you might not expect.

Representative Clay Higgins (R-La) was the lone member of Congress to vote this past week against a bill ordering the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. He was right to do so.

Clay Higgins is many things: a fifth-term congressman, a stalwart conservative, a staunch supporter of Donald Trump, a House Freedom Caucus member, a former law enforcement officer, an occasional rabble-rouser, and someone who got suspended from Facebook for allegedly inciting gun violence.

Full disclosure, I was once suspended from Facebook, also for allegedly inciting gun violence, after I opined in a post on a newspaper forum that the best way to safely and non-destructively halt the Chinese spy platform that was then floating unimpeded over our country was to bring it down slowly somewhere in the Plains states with a single round from the cannon of an F-35 into the large, difficult-to-miss balloon holding the whole thing up.

Evidently, according to META, gun violence against spy balloons is a thing. Balloons are people too, my friend. Who knew?

So I feel Congressman Higgins’s pain there; nonetheless, Higgins is my new most favorite person. That on account of his actions in regard to the Epstein bill passed this past week over his objections, as explained in the following post on X.

To be clear, I generally favor the release of any and all information related to Jeffrey Epstein. Do I think that it means squat? No, not really. I think that it’s pablum that both parties hope might distract voters from how lousy of a job they are doing. The only value of releasing the information lies in showing the American people that sleaze knows no political boundaries. Epstein had money and influence, and those are universal aphrodisiacs when ingratiating oneself into politics and power.

Along that line, some good has already come with the release of this information. Larry Summers, former United States Secretary of the Treasury, former president of Harvard University, and Epstein pen pal—a hagfish disguised as a human sock puppet—is already slinking off into the sunset. That’s something that’s simply difficult for me to feel bad about.

So, yes, I’m generally for more transparency than less when it comes to accountability. Transparency builds trust, and that’s something that’s sorely lacking these days vis-á-vis Americans and their government. But in this case, that trust-building exercise comes at a very high and mostly unnecessary cost: that of betraying the confidence of potentially hundreds, if not thousands, of people who are guilty of nothing apart from cooperating with investigators in trying to put Epstein behind bars in the first place. This bill screws a lot of those folks. That shouldn’t happen.

“What do I tell the my source for the next tough story, huh? ‘Hang in with us, you’ll be ok maybe’? No. What got broken here doesn’t go back together.” - Lowell Bergman, The Insider

People cooperate with police, investigators and grand juries for many reasons. Sometimes it’s to get themselves off the hook. Prisons are filled with two types of people: those who snitched and those who wish they had snitched. If you are one of the former, it’s way better for you if no one ever sees the paperwork despite the fact that what was right for you was also right for justice. Ask any member of law enforcement how far most investigations would go without confidential informants (and how long those CIs would last if word got around that they were informants). Most investigations would go nowhere without witnesses willing to come forward, often anonymously.

Ask any prosecutor how many people, most of whom have done absolutely nothing wrong, would voluntarily testify before a grand jury at potentially great cost to themselves if that testimony were not supposed to remain secret. The truth isn’t a Kevlar vest. Sometimes doing the right thing comes at a very high cost. Protecting the identities of innocent witnesses is not only the right thing to do, it’s the best way to elicit useful testimony. Blow that up, and things change. Stick with me, kid, and you’ll be OK, maybe, doesn’t exactly engender an overabundance of confidence.

The Epstein files release mania is a bum rush through centuries of tried and true legal process designed to protect witnesses who often have, themselves, done little or absolutely nothing wrong. Now, because of mob rule, we are throwing people like these under the bus. I’m not for that because the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Neither is Clay Higgins.

Higgins might have lost 527-1 in Congress, but he sure won me over. And the blowback against him (How dare you protect a pedophile!) is, at least so far, less than I might have anticipated (unless Al Jazeera counts). I think that a number of people understand that it should have been possible to amend the Epstein bill in a manner that would protect witnesses had Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) not nixed a proposal by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La) due to an intraparty spat over the recent bill to reopen the government. You kids really need to learn how to play better.

So here’s one for Clay Higgins. Mr. Higgins and I may not ever agree on another single thing ever again, but he’s still alright in my book. The self-confidence and courage to stand on principle are rarities in public life anymore, and I think that they ought to be celebrated whenever they’re displayed. Mr. Higgins might have lost a lopsided vote in Congress, but he’s one of only a handful of politicians I’d welcome into my home. Anyone can be on the right side of a landslide they see coming. Standing on principle right in front of one is far more difficult.

Salute, Representative Higgins.

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time with family, riding bicycles and motorcycles, and arranging and playing music. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.