The press has grabbed hold of another non-issue in the hopes of making the Trump Administration look bad. This effort is failing more spectacularly than most: the removal of Kamala Harris’ Secret Service protection.
Of course, the punditry doesn’t understand why their effort has failed to get traction; they tell themselves it’s because she’s a black woman (which she’s not), or because the Republicans are “settling scores” (this administration has too much work to do, fixing the mess the Biden-Harris regime left, to waste time on such pettiness).
The simple fact is – for an Administration that’s looking for cost savings for a nation awash in debt, and concurrently trying to return the rule of law to primacy, in a government that had strayed too far in the direction of the rule of whim – removing Kamala Harris’ security extension after six months was the right thing to do.
This does seem petty, at first glance, without knowing the numbers involved. But consider this: the annual budget for the Secret Service is about $3 billion.
We are used to big dollars being thrown around in Washington D.C., so for context, note that there are over thirty independent nations, such as San Marino, the British Virgin Islands, and the Central African Republic, with annual GDPs lower than our Secret Service budget.
So to the denizens of Washington, this may look like chump change, but to most of the world, this is a lot of money, and we ought to also think of it as such.
It’s difficult to estimate just how much a specific Secret Service detail costs, because it depends somewhat on the individual’s lifestyle and family. Does the person travel a lot, give speeches, have multiple residences, spend time in easily defended places or in places that are very difficult to defend? It’s cheaper to assign bodyguards to someone who stays in his home or office than someone who really gets around.
We recently got a rare, specific glimpse into these details, when Secret Service protection was dropped for two former NSAs, John Bolton and Robert O’Brien, and Congress pulled the records to share with the public. According to this investigation, it cost about $12 million per year to cover the two of them. Again, don’t assume that works out to $6 million each; much of the cost depends on the above specifics. Harris typically had over a dozen agents in her security detail, sometimes a couple dozen, so she was much more expensive than Bolton and O’Brien.
So now that we have some background, let’s look at the specific case of Kamala Harris.
She spent four years holding the title of Vice President, at the end of which, she was herself a candidate for the presidency for a few months.
According to federal law, a former president gets Secret Service protection for life, and a former vice president gets Secret Service protection for six months.
That’s it. That’s the law. And there is some logic behind it.
A president is remembered, recognizable, active. He’s on the television, the radio, the newspaper every day. His visage is imprinted in the public’s eye forever. To the extent that there may be threats out there, he remains recognizable for life.
By contrast, the vice president traditionally does relatively little. He breaks the occasional tie in the U.S. Senate, he gives fundraising speeches, maybe he appears on the Sunday morning talk shows for the political junkies to watch, but the public really only sees him during the election and when he sits next to the Speaker during a State of the Union address.
As a result, vice presidents (except for the ones who go on to the presidency themselves) tend to be forgotten rather quickly. They had no power while in office; they certainly won’t have any power after they leave.
Therefore, when Congress decided to give presidents lifelong security and to only give vice presidents another six months, they didn’t make that decision lightly.
We can’t afford Secret Service protection for every politician in America; after his or her term of office is over, the former vice president is just another politician.
But there are a few interesting issues regarding this particular case, which are also worth considering:
Kamala Harris was born to two non-citizens. Both of her parents were here on student visas, from Jamaica and India. This makes her what we would now call an “anchor baby,” someone whose US citizenship is dependent on a questionable reading of the 14th amendment (currently under litigation, in fact). She was therefore born with at least dual citizenship – British and Indian – triple if you accept the strained interpretation that provides US citizenship too.
Under the Constitution of the United States, any kind of US citizen – natural born, native born, or naturalized – can hold any other federal office, from representative to judge to secretary, but not the presidency. While most states, unfortunately, don’t have an institutional mechanism to enforce it, the Constitution specifically requires that the president and vice president must be a “natural born citizen.” This term has a couple of different legal definitions and paths, but the essence of it is that the person must have been born with only US citizenship, not dual or triple. Kamala Harris was therefore ineligible for the office in the first place. Under the law, she could not legally serve as president or vice president at all.
Next, the 2020 election that propelled her from the Senate into the Vice President’s residence was not legitimately decided. We don’t have to accept the complex and difficult-to-prove claims of Sidney Powell and Lin Wood concerning remote tampering of ballot counting computer systems to come to this conclusion; simple math provides the proof that something is untrustworthy about the 2020 election totals.
After several presidential elections in a row in which the voter turnout hovered around 130 million, there were 22 million more ballots counted in 2020 than in 2016, a statistically impossible jump from 136 million to 158 million. Countless lawsuits were thrown out of court before evidence was presented, as judges thought it was an issue for the state legislatures and Congress to decide, and then, when the opportunity arose for Congress to make the call on January 6, 2021, a manufactured demonstration interrupted the process right in the middle of the opportunity for legislative debate. To say that the Biden-Harris regime was utterly illegitimate due to a stolen election is no longer a radical position.
Next, Kamala Harris’ position at the top of the 2024 ticket was even wilder. She was selected to replace Joe Biden on the ticket when he was forced to withdraw in July, after his senility was finally, unmistakably exposed in a presidential debate against President Trump. Instead of a proper, legal, rush campaign leading to a proper vote by the elected delegates at the party convention, she was selected to be the nominee “by acclamation” on a single telephone conference call run by the DNC. Nikita Khruschev’s gradual replacement of Georgy Malenkov doesn’t hold a candle to this speedy and illegal usurpation.
Now back to the law: the statutory time period for Secret Service protection to continue for a former vice president is six months, but there was an extension issued in an executive order purportedly signed by Joe Biden, reportedly giving her an additional year, though a president’s authority to do so is unclear. With what we now know about the Biden White House and the constant use of the autopen there, it is incredibly unlikely that Joe Biden actually signed any such order; it’s equally unlikely that he ever even knew it was written and signed in his behalf.
One of the many challenges of the second Trump administration is analyzing the countless illegal actions of the Biden regime, and deciding which ones to overturn and how, and in what order. One can’t do everything in a day; one has to prioritize based on cost, ease, importance, likelihood of resulting in a dispute to litigate, and so many other things. This one was easily to do and easily justified; there will be hundreds more in that bucket, just as there are hundreds more in the bucket of issues with less ease or higher cost, or less importance or more likelihood to spur litigation. The question asked in any such decision is whether it will be cost-effective.
But perhaps there is a different question we should be looking at here, completely separate from all the above.
Why should a president or vice president need protection at all? Why should government-funded security be needed for any politician?
There are two answers to that, which rise above the relatively unimportant, uninteresting, and uninspiring character of the subject at hand, Kamala Harris of California.
First, why is there any danger in the United States, at all? Why does anyone, from civilian to politician, have reason to fear violence? Primarily because of lax criminal justice positions taken by the American Left. It is, after all, the Democratic party that has spent a half century refusing to punish criminals, insisting on turning them loose instead of jailing them, and even inviting more criminals in through open border policies. To the extent that anyone has reason to fear violence, it’s because of the policies of Kamala Harris and her wing; perhaps if they feel fear, they ought to look inward for an explanation.
And second, why might a politician have a special fear of violence, a fear that rises beyond a regular civilian’s fears? The answer to that is found in a recognition of how far America has fallen from the Limited Government philosophy of our Founding Fathers. The only reason to attack a politician is a disagreement with how that politician used or abused his power when he had it. Justifiable or not, millions of Americans have reason to be upset at politicians, current and past, for the actions taken by government, in picking winners and losers, in doling out rewards and grants, in playing favorites in the economy and in the everyday sweepstakes for government cheese.
If government did less – as in fact our Founding Fathers intended, and as the Constitution requires – there would be far fewer grounds for Americans to be upset with our politicians.
There is a reason why dictators such as Hitler, Stalin, Castro and Mao feared their own people; they didn’t want what happened to Mussolini, Ceaucesku, and so many other dictators throughout history to happen to them, too, when their time was up.
If we want a society in which our retired politicians don’t have to fear an angry public, perhaps we should all work harder to achieve a society in which our politicians obeyed the Constitutional limits on their actions.
Our Founding Fathers intended us all to enjoy a federal government so small that no killer would ever see any point in bumping off a politician.
And by the way, before we close, never forget this:
For his entire 20-year retirement between his 1974 resignation and his death in 1994, Richard Nixon paid for his own security detail himself. He was horrified at the idea of the American taxpayer funding the protection of an ex-president. President Nixon wasn’t from my wing of the party; I had my disagreements with the gentleman, but he was an honorable man, infinitely superior to any of Democrats on the national scene today.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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