Democrats’ bill would strip provision from funding bill that allowed senators to sue over phone records

US Capitol Building (Photo by Mike Kline (notkalvin)/Getty Images)

(WASHINGTON) — Democratic Sens. Martin Heinrich and Mark Kelly will introduce legislation in the Senate on Tuesday that would strip out a provision in the just-passed government funding bill that allows senators to sue the government if their phone records are investigated without notifying them. 

The bill comes after Senate Republicans included within the massive government funding bill that ended the 43-day government shutdown a provision that would allow senators whose phone records were subpoenaed by Special Counsel Jack Smith as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol to sue for $500,000 per accessed device.

News of the Senate’s inclusion of this provision caused bipartisan outrage in the House of Representatives.

House Speaker Mike Johnson last week said the House would hold a standalone vote on a provision to strip the language out of the funding bill this week. Due to the bipartisan objection to these provisions, the House bill has a high likelihood of being successfully passed out of the lower chamber.

“I think that was way out of line. I don’t think that was a smart thing … and the House is going to reverse — we are going to repeal that, and I’m going to expect our colleagues in the Senate to do the same thing,” Johnson said at a press conference last week.

Kelly and Heinrich’s bill is not identical to the House provision but the two bills closely resemble one another. 

Efforts to repeal the phone record provision face a far more difficult path in the Senate than in the House. 

The bill has 24 Democratic co-sponsors but currently no GOP supporters. 

Sources told ABC News that Senate Majority Leader John Thune was personally responsible for including the language in the bill. Thune would be the one responsible for placing the bill on the floor, where it would need 60 votes to advance. 

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