The Trump era sometimes feels like a trip through obscure and rarely used mechanisms of federal power, ranging from the emoluments clause to the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. The latest way station in this civic journey is Subsection 11(g) of House Rule X, which outlines the arcane procedure by which Congress can pressure the president to release classified information.

The House Intelligence Committee has now invoked this provision twice in the last two weeks. First, members voted along party lines to release a memo compiled by the committee’s Republican staffers that alleged partisan abuses by federal law-enforcement officials involved in the Russia investigation. House Republicans and conservative media outlets hyped the memo as proof of a political conspiracy against the president, while Democrats and the Justice Department warned that it was highly misleading and potentially damaging to natural security. In the end, the Nunes memo—named for Representative Devin Nunes, the committee chairman—didn’t prove its point or appear to endanger the country’s safety.

The committee’s Republican majority also voted against releasing a ten-page memo drafted by Democratic staffers that purportedly refutes some of the Nunes memo’s claims. But the committee changed course on Monday and unanimously approved the memo’s release, triggering the Subsection 11(g) process for the Democratic memo. Trump now has five days to review its contents and decide whether to approve its release to the public.

This rule dates back to the post-Watergate surveillance reforms of the mid-1970s. At the time, the goal was to balance Congress’ interests in oversight of intelligence agencies with the president’s responsibility to preserve national secrets. Lawfare’s Molly Reynolds noted that Subsection 11(g)’s drafters predicted that the process would be handled judiciously by future American leaders. She quoted Senator Abraham Ribicoff, the Democratic chairman of the Government Operations Committee:

So it is obviously our intention that the President would not act capriciously, but only act if it were a matter of gravity. Of course, none of us could tell the President of the United States what he considers to be a grave matter. I would assume, on the basis of comity, that the President certainly is not going to abuse his discretion. It is my feeling that the President will act responsibly, as I would expect the intelligent oversight committee would act responsibly, in determining whether a matter should be publicly disclosed.

Forty years later, Trump hasn’t lived up to their expectations. For the Nunes memo, the president’s thinking was straightforward: Releasing it carried the short-term political benefit of undermining the credibility of the Justice Department and the FBI, which are currently investigating him and his presidential campaign. Its predicted impact on natural security, which appears to have been inflated by Trump’s critics, and its damage to congressional oversight of intelligence agencies, which is more certain, apparently mattered little in the president’s decision-making process.