The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is poised to pass legislation tonight to reopen the federal government, though one controversial provision has reportedly been stripped out.
That's according to a Wednesday article by the conservative Washington Times' Lindsey McPherson, who reported that both House Republicans and Democrats soured on language in the government funding bill that passed through the Senate last weekend. That section would have allowed for Republican senators whose phone records were accessed by former Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith to sue for potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) said he was "surprised" when he noticed that section.
“Did I know about this provision in the bill? No,” Cole said. “Do I think it needs to be in a funding bill? Not particularly.”
However, removing that section would result in the bill having to go back through the U.S. Senate before making its way to President Donald Trump's desk. And because lawmakers are eager to end the 43-day government shutdown (which is officially the longest in U.S. history), the House agreed to pass the Senate bill on the condition that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) call a separate vote to repeal the provision next week before the Thanksgiving recess.
"House Republicans are introducing standalone legislation to repeal this provision that was included by the Senate in the government funding bill," Johnson wrote on X. “We are putting this legislation on the fast track suspension calendar in the House for next week.”
Last month, Fox News reported that Smith's investigators accessed the phone records of multiple Republicans in January of 2021, including Sens. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.), Ron Johnson (R-Wis.), Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) and Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) along with Rep. Mike Kelly (R-Pa.). Smith's team did not have knowledge of what was said in those conversations, and data was limited to phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls and the dates and times of those calls.
Smith's prosecutors accessed lawmakers' phone records as part of their "Operation: Arctic Frost" investigation into the Trump 2020 campaign's "fake elector" scheme, in which Republicans sought to have alternate slates of pro-Trump presidential electors presented and signed in battleground states then-President Joe Biden narrowly won.
Click here to read the Washington Times' full report.