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. It allows each senator to sue for at least $500,000.
The last-minute insertion of the measure into a must-pass bill late last year had infuriated Republicans and Democrats in the House — and many in the Senate. They objected in particular to the retroactive nature of the measure, which appeared aimed at ensuring that eight Republican senators whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators examining efforts by President Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election could seek personal payouts.
So the House fired back on Thursday, using its own must-pass spending package, which was scheduled for a vote later in the day, to undo the provision. House leaders were essentially daring the Senate to either accept the language or shut down the government.
Lawmakers made clear their disdain for the legal provision earlier this year, when members of the House realized that their counterparts in the Senate had jammed them.
“What they did is wrong,” Representative Austin Scott, Republican of Georgia, said of the Senate. “This should not be in this piece of legislation, and they can say it’s about good governance all they want to. When they made it retroactive, all of a sudden it was no longer about good governance. There’s actually a list of people that know they will get paid as soon as this thing is signed.”
Catie Edmondson covers Congress for The Times.
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