Washington — The House unanimously passed a bill Wednesday to repeal a controversial provision that allows senators to sue for $500,000 if federal investigators search their phone records without their knowledge.
House leaders fast-tracked the bill under suspension of the rules, which requires a two-thirds majority for passage. The bill easily cleared the lower chamber in a 426 to 0 vote.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune said Tuesday that he wasn’t sure how the upper chamber would approach the legislation, but he defended the provision allowing the lawsuits.
“The House isn’t implicated in what we did. It just simply applies to the Senate,” he said. “There’s a statute that obviously was violated and 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.”
The new law requires service providers to notify senators if their phone records or other data are seized or subpoenaed. A court cannot delay notification unless the senator is the target of a criminal investigation.
The bill states: “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.”
Senators are entitled to $500,000 for each violation under the new law, which also limits how the government can rebut the claims. The law is retroactive to 2022, meaning it would allow at least eight senators to sue the federal government over their phone records being seized during special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into President Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The provision was tucked into a yearlong measure to fund the legislative branch, which passed Congress last week as part of a broader package to end the government shutdown. Thune told reporters Wednesday that he takes the fact that some lawmakers were unaware of the provision as a “legitimate criticism in terms of the process.”
“But I think on the substance, I believe that you need to have some sort of accountability and consequence for that kind of weaponization against a co-equal independent branch of the government,” he added.
As the package moved through the House Rules Committee last week, Democrats tried to amend the bill to remove the provision. Several Republicans on the committee expressed surprise and anger over the provision’s inclusion, but said they had to support the overall package to reopen the government because removing it would prolong the shutdown by sending the amended bill back to the Senate.
“What they did is wrong,” GOP Rep. Austin Scott of Georgia said last week. “There’s actually a list of people that know they will get paid as soon as this thing is signed — at least they’ve got the coupon where all they have to do is go file at the courthouse to get paid.”
GOP Rep. Chip Roy of Texas called the provision “self-serving” and criticized its last-minute insertion into the bill without any debate.
“It is beside my comprehension that this got put in the bill, and it’s why people have such a low opinion of this town,” Roy said.
Citing the provision, Rep. Greg Steube, a Florida Republican, refused to vote for the funding package to reopen the government.
After a conversation with Thune last week, House Speaker Mike Johnson said the South Dakota Republican “regretted the way it was done.” Johnson said the Senate’s move was “way out of line.”
Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, said he did not ask Thune to commit to holding a vote in the Senate, but he expected the chamber to do so.
Johnson said Wednesday he met with Thune and hoped the Senate would take up the bill.
“We’ll have that discussion,” Johnson told reporters.
The Republican senators whose phone records were subpoenaed as part of Smith’s election interference investigation were: Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming, Dan Sullivan of Alaska and Tommy Tuberville of Alabama.
Most of the eight senators said they do not plan to seek damages under the new law. And Thune said it isn’t about the money, but the principle.
“I don’t think there’s anybody that was targeted for whom the money matters,” he said.
Graham, however, indicated he plans to take action.
“If you think I’m going to settle this thing for a million dollars — no,” he said last week. “I want to make it so painful no one ever does this again.”
Still, Thune said “everybody’s focusing on the private right of action,” but he said “the important thing in all of this is, where is the accountability and what is the consequence of bad behavior? And if there’s no penalty associated with it, you’re going to get more of the same.”