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House Republicans Slam ‘Self-Dealing’ Senate Republican Payday In Funding Bill

WASHINGTON – Conservative House Republicans slammed a multi-million dollar giveaway to eight GOP senators tucked into legislation ending the government shutdown on Tuesday night, but said they had no choice but to move the bill forward.

During a meeting of the House Rules Committee to set up a vote Wednesday that could end the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, Democrats and Republican members of the panel repeatedly bashed the senator payday provision.

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Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) read parts of the provision from the dais in seeming disbelief that senators would write a bill that so directly rewards themselves.

“I personally agree this should be removed,” Scott said. “The problem is, if we remove it, it has to go back to the Senate.”

Scott suggested the provision would make it difficult to vote for the bill.

“I’ve struggled with what to do. What they did is wrong,” Scott added, noting that it was dropped into the bill at the last minute without any consideration by committees in either chamber of Congress.

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Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) agreed, calling the provision “self-serving, self-dealing kind of stuff” and saying it “needs to get fixed as soon as possible.”

But he said that stripping it out of the bill now would only prolong the government shutdown since the Senate would then have to approve it again before it goes to the president for his signature. The upper chamber already left town on Monday after it passed the bill following a 41-day impasse over health care.

The provision – apparently put in at the direction of Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) – would specifically give members of the U.S. Senate the power to sue the government if their office phone records had been obtained without notification by the Justice Department. It would not apply to members of the House.

The measure, which would be retroactive to 2022, seems designed to benefit Republican senators whose phone records were obtained in 2023 as part of the Justice Department’s investigation into President Donald Trump’s efforts to overthrow the 2020 presidential election result. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) revealed last month senate phone records had been obtained by the investigation.

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The legislative text says, in part: “Any Senator whose Senate data, or the Senate data of whose Senate office, has been acquired, subpoenaed, searched, accessed, or disclosed in violation of this section may bring a civil action against the United States if the violation was committed by an officer, employee, or agent of the United States or of any Federal department or agency.”

The eight senators who would likely be eligible to file claims are Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.).

The bill provides for $500,000 in damages for each violation, Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M) noted on Tuesday, meaning the cost to the government could be far higher since DOJ accessed data logs of some senators more than once as part of the inquiry. She introduced an amendment to strip the provision out of the bill, but it will almost certainly be rejected by Republicans.

“The bottom line is, if we amend this bill with anything at all we risk extending the shutdown,” Scott said.

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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, put out a lengthy statement on Tuesday afternoon slamming the payout provision as “blatantly corrupt” and a plunder of public resources.

In an interview, Raskin noted that since the senators were the subject of both subpoenas and judicial non-disclosure orders, they could individually be eligible for at least $1 million in damages right off the bat.

“The senators are saying that they each want a million dollars because Donald Trump got them involved in the attempted political coup and violent insurrection of January 6, and a grand jury wanted to see their phone records,” Raskin told HuffPost.

Raskin said the proposal could run afoul of the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

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“It gives 100 U.S. senators rights in the criminal justice process that every other American does not get, and so this is essentially uplifting the class of U.S. senators above everybody else in the country,” he said.

Attorneys for Jack Smith, the former special counsel who led the investigation into Trump’s fraudulent attempt to remain in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election, denied any wrongdoing, saying it was an authorized tactic to understand the actions of Trump and his allies during and leading up to his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. Several GOP senators were often in contact with Trump, including Johnson and Lee, who supported his efforts to challenge the 2020 election results.

Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), addressing the Rules Committee as a senior appropriator, admitted the provision was inappropriate, but suggested it wasn’t worth amending the legislation and delaying the reopening of the government.

“I was surprised to see it in the bill. I was unaware of it,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said. “Do I think it needs to be in a funding bill? Not particularly. But do I think getting the government open is important? Yes, I do.”