The Senate is expected to swallow a House-passed provision that would nix a law that allows senators to receive cash payouts if they had their phone records seized by former special counsel Jack Smith.
Majority Leader John Thune said in an interview Thursday night he currently anticipates the repeal language to remain a part of the government funding package the Senate hopes to pass in the coming hours, but which has not yet been unveiled.
A second person granted anonymity to disclose private discussions confirmed that the House provision is likely to be preserved. A third person, a Senate aide, also said the expectation is that the House language stays in.
It goes back to the spending agreement Congress cleared last November to end the record-breaking government shutdown. At that time, the Senate quietly inserted a new policy into the legislation which would have the effect of allowing certain Republican senators to sue the federal government for hundreds of thousands of dollars if they had their electronic records seized without prior notification during Smith’s 2021 probe of President Donald Trump’s attempts to subvert the results of the 2020 election.
House members of both parties were horrified by the language, which they learned about only after the fact, and quickly passed legislation unanimously to undo it. They took steps last week to tuck that repeal into a separate, six-bill government funding package the Senate will need to pass before the end of the day Friday to avoid a partial government shutdown.
But now the chamber is preparing to strip out the Homeland Security appropriations bill to negotiate new provisions around immigration enforcement activities and pass the other five, and it has been an open question throughout the day Thursday whether the repeal provision would remain intact.
While the funding agreement hasn’t been announced yet on the Senate floor — meaning it could still change as leaders try to wrangle holdouts, whose blessing they need in order to speed up a passage vote before the shutdown deadline — senators were sending signals that there was a bipartisan appetite to keep it.
“I think it was politically tone deaf to put a monetary penalty in there,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), who has been leading the charge to re-investigate the work of Smith’s office.
Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.), who had expressed frustration that he was not consulted on the initial measure as ranking member of the relevant appropriations subcommittee, said he would advocate for the repeal provision to be included in any funding bill the Senate considers this week.
“I think it should be part of anything we vote on,” he said.
