A routine day in the Senate blew apart Thursday as a buried provision in last week’s government funding bill ignited a brutal, hours-long clash — one so heated that the presiding chair had to step in to enforce the chamber’s decorum rules.
At the center of the uproar: a GOP-backed measure allowing a small group of Republican senators to collect massive, taxpayer-funded payouts.
The showdown began when Senate Majority Leader John Thune tried to defuse mounting outrage over the measure, which allows GOP senators surveilled by the Biden-era Justice Department to sue the government for up to $500,000 per instance of obtaining their phone records. Some senators could potentially walk away with millions.
Amid accusations that the whole thing reeks of self-enrichment, Thune pitched a compromise: a resolution, approved by unanimous consent, ensuring any damages awarded would go straight to the U.S. Treasury instead of lawmakers’ pockets.
“This would clarify that any damages awarded under this law would be forfeited to the United States Treasury. So, no United States senator could benefit,” Thune said, defending a provision he has spent days trying to justify.
Democrats immediately shut the door on the idea.
They argued that simply redirecting the money didn’t fix the fundamental problem — the optics of allowing lawmakers to file lucrative, retroactive lawsuits over investigations that were legal at the time.
Sen. Martin Heinrich rejected Thune’s proposal on the spot, insisting the Senate needed a “statutory change” and calling the damages language “outrageous.” He urged the Senate to work with the House, which hours earlier had voted 426–0 to kill the provision entirely.
Then Heinrich unloaded.
“This provision allows eight Republican senators to collect millions of dollars from the U.S. government,” he said, blasting it as a “blatant tax-funded cash grab.” He warned that taxpayers would end up footing the bill despite the government having followed the law.
“That money would be paid from your hard-earned tax dollars,” Heinrich said. “Frankly, this is just outrageous to me.”
That’s when Sen. Lindsey Graham stormed in. As one of the senators who could personally collect a payout, Graham objected loudly and demanded answers — from everyone.
“What did I do wrong? What did I do to allow the government to seize my personal phone and my official phone when I was Senate Judiciary chairman? What did I do?” Graham asked, voice raised.
Then he made clear he plans to use the new law exactly as written.
“I’m going to sue Biden’s DOJ and Jack Smith, I’m going to sue Verizon,” Graham declared. He added that the financial damages owed to him would be staggering: “It’s going to be a hell of a lot more than $500,000. This is twice it happened to me.”
Graham blamed the surveillance on “being friends of Trump, being supporters of Trump,” venting frustration with the Justice Department and the Fulton County investigation into his actions after the 2020 election.
Democratic Sen. Gary Peters followed Graham and leveled a sharp accusation: that Republicans deliberately tucked the provision into the funding bill to personally profit from it.
“They snuck in, in the dark of night, a provision at the last minute that would allow them to basically line their pockets,” Peters said. He warned it “could go into the millions of dollars” for “a very select group of Republican senators.”
The presiding chair had to intervene, reminding Peters of Senate Rule XIX, which bars senators from accusing each other of corrupt motives on the floor.
But the warning didn’t erase the spectacle — the Senate had already descended into open warfare over a provision almost no one knew was in the bill until after it passed.
In the end, Graham blocked the effort to approve a House-passed measure to repeal the controversial provision.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, a New Mexico Democrat, sought unanimous consent to approve the measure after the House unanimously passed the bill Wednesday, saying the provision many lawmakers are looking to repeal, which was tucked in last week’s funding package, represents a country that “is not serving the people.”
“Last week Republicans in Congress passed a government funding bill that denies affordable health care to millions of Americans,” Heinrich said. “But what most people don’t know is that they also voted to provide millions of dollars to a few Republican senators in a blatant, tax-funded cash grab.”
