In unanimous vote, House tries to block Senate Republicans from cashing in on faux scandal

In a deeply divided U.S. House in which practically every vote seems contentious, it’s good to know that some ideas can still pass with literally no opposition. The New York Times reported:

The House on Thursday voted unanimously to tuck language into a spending bill that would repeal a law that created a new avenue for senators to sue the government if federal investigators gained access to their phone records without notifying them.

The 427-0 vote amounted to a bipartisan rebuke of the Senate after leaders in that chamber in November slipped the legal provision into legislation to reopen the government after the nation’s longest shutdown.

After Congress ended last fall’s government shutdown, the public learned of a provocative provision that Senate Republicans had slipped into the package. Under the language in the bill, GOP senators whose phone records were searched as part of special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Capitol riots of Jan. 6, 2021, would have the ability to file lucrative lawsuits. (Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas told Politico that it was Senate Majority Leader John Thune himself who made sure this provision was included in the final bill.)

Even by contemporary congressional standards, it was a brazen move — in part because the GOP’s “Arctic Frost” claims appear baseless, in part because the provision was added to the legislation in secret, and in part because it’s rare to see senators empower themselves to file dubious lawsuits in which they would personally be rewarded with taxpayer money.

A Roll Call report added, “Congress flouted several legal principles with an unusual provision creating a streamlined path only for senators to file lawsuits and collect at least $1 million each for government actions in the previous administration, experts and critics say.”

A variety of senators, including some of the GOP members whose phone records were subpoenaed, distanced themselves from the provision. But not Sen. Lindsey Graham, who was one of the eight GOP senators eligible for a possible payout. He boasted that he intended to take advantage of the opportunity and told Fox News in November that he plans to “sue the hell out of these people,” to the tune of “tens of millions of dollars.”

There’s still no evidence that “these people” did anything wrong.

None of this was well received in the House, including among some GOP members who were annoyed that they had been excluded from the potential payoffs.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, the House approved a measure on a 426-0 vote designed to block GOP senators from cashing in on the faux controversy. Predictably, Republican leaders in the upper chamber ignored the effort.

So this week the House tried again, adding the same prohibition to a must-pass spending bill, which passed late Thursday.

For his part, the Senate majority leader has tried to defend the policy that’s generated bipartisan rebuke, telling NBC News in November, “What this does is enables people who are harmed — in this case, United States senators — to have a private right of action against the weaponization … by the Justice Department.”

Reality, however, is stubborn: The senators were not actually harmed in any way, and there’s literally no evidence to support the party’s claim of “weaponization.”

It remains unclear whether the amendment to the spending bill will survive when the Senate takes up the legislation. Watch this space.

This post updates our related earlier coverage.

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