GOP Threatened To Keep The Government Shut Down If 8 GOP Senators Couldn’t Profit From Being Investigated

from the grand-old-party-of-shitheels dept

Last night the House passed, and then Donald Trump signed, the funding bill that reopened the government after the longest government shutdown in history. Amazingly, the Republican’s sketchy demands to fill their personal bank accounts with undeserved taxpayer money almost scuttled the deal. But, don’t worry: those Senators got their corrupt boondoggle and they plan to enrich themselves.

The party of pure fucking garbage just keeps being awful. Government employees went without paychecks, families went without medical and food benefits, and no one in the GOP really appeared to care how long an entire nation suffers so long as it got what it wanted.

“Ask not what this country can do for you” is apparently too woke to be considered an aspiration. Under Trump’s GOP, the operative phrase is “Don’t even ask whether or not it can. Make the country do for you and fuck them if they complain.”

Enjoy what is probably only the fourth or fifth example of GOP ghoulishness you’ll see today, courtesy of the New York Times’ Devlin Barrett:

A spending package expected to be approved as part of a deal to reopen the government would create a wide legal avenue for senators to sue for as much as half a million dollars each when federal investigators search their phone records without notifying them.

The provision, tucked into a measure to fund the legislative branch, appears to immediately allow for eight G.O.P. senators to sue the government over their phone records being seized in the course of the investigation by Jack Smith, the former special counsel, into the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

To be clear, legitimate concerns have been raised about warrantless access to Americans’ phone records, especially when the FBI utilizes the NSA’s collections to engage in “backdoor” searches.

But there’s nothing legitimate about what is happening here. Congressional reps have sought carve-outs that only serve themselves and have expressed almost zero concern about how this same warrantless access affects the people they serve.

So, not only have GOP legislators placed themselves above the people they serve by only seeking to exclude themselves from the reality that affects the rest of us, they went further by holding the entire government hostage with a demand that has no business being tacked onto a federal funding bill, and one that only serves to give those eight Senators the freedom to grab hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money.

If they want to give themselves extra privileges, they should have the strength of character to introduce this in an actual bill that would be forced to stand on its own merits (read: lack thereof), rather than force the Democratic party to comply as federal government websites (illegally!) pillory them on a daily basis as the people who are keeping American citizens from collecting paychecks and benefits.

It gets even worse when you look at the details:

Because the provision is retroactive to 2022, it would appear to make eligible the eight lawmakers whose phone records were subpoenaed by investigators for Mr. Smith as he examined efforts by Donald J. Trump to obstruct the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Each violation would be worth at least $500,000 in any legal claim, according to the bill language. The bill would also sharply limit the way the government could resist such a claim, taking away any government claims of qualified or sovereign immunity to fight a lawsuit over the issue.

This isn’t even about the FBI’s abuse of NSA collections, which would actually be something worth limiting further. It’s specifically and only about eight GOP Senators whose phone records were sought under the Third Party Doctrine — something that few people in the government would attack because that court-created doctrine has proven extremely useful to law enforcement at every level.

But it also adds a payout for those “victimized” by a legitimate investigation into the attack on the Capitol building following Trump’s loss in the 2020 election. And guess who these people are:

Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty of Tennessee, Josh Hawley of Missouri, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming. 

^{Citation[s]: Lindsey Graham, Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, Josh Hawley, Dan Sullivan, Tommy Tuberville, Ron Johnson, Cynthia Lummis}

Yep, it’s the expected collection of boot-lickers. These are people unfit to serve who may see themselves raking in at least a half-million for stroking Trump’s ego and repeating his lies about the 2020 election.

Lindsey Graham has already said he plans to make people pay for having his phone records accessed, which is rich, because Graham has been one of the most vocal proponents in the Senate of giving the DOJ vast and unlimited surveillance powers. Also, when he says “make people pay” he means that you, the taxpayer, needs to give him money because he got caught up in the DOJ’s investigation into the attempted insurrection.

These Senators who have no problem expanding surveillance on you, the little people, also simultaneously are awarding themselves a special provision to sue for your tax money to go straight into their bank account. It’s about as corrupt as it can be. Incredibly, they even screwed over a colleague in the House, Mike Kelly, who was the one member of the House whose phone records were part of the same investigation. The funding bill only allows for Senators to sue over this.

No one else will benefit from this but these eight GOP senators. The rest of the nation can continue to get fucked on the regular.

As Rep. Jamie Raskin noted:

“The Senators may not like being treated like the rest of America, but these phone-record subpoenas and non-disclosure orders are routine in grand jury investigations at the state and federal level,” he said. “No one has an absolute right to be notified that their call records have been subpoenaed, much less the right to a million bucks if it happens. This provision would not give any Americans other than U. S. Senators these rights.”

Passing a law that only applies to eight Senators, which only serves to enrich them at the expense of the taxpayer seems like a perfect encapsulation of the state of the modern GOP: fuck the little guy and do anything to get money for yourself. The MAGA mantra.

While Speaker Mike Johnson has said that they’ll bring up a separate bill next week to strip this provision, Republicans in the House refused to strip it during negotiations over the funding bill, where it would have actually mattered. What is now likely to happen is that Johnson will allow a vote on a bill next week in a symbolic gesture that will not pass. And Senator Graham and his buddies will cash in.

What a job, when you get to vote yourself the ability to just take a bunch of taxpayer money in response to being investigated.

Filed Under: corruption, fbi, gop, insurrection, jack smith, january 6, lindsey graham, phone records, revenge, surveillance, trump administration