Ranking Member Raskin’s Statement on Corrupt ‘Million-Dollar Jackpot Provision’ Tucked Into Massive GOP Spending Bill for A Select Group of Republican Senators

Washington, D.C. (November 11, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Committee on the Judiciary, issued the following statement after Senate Republicans snuck into their spending bill a corrupt provision to allow for $500,000 paydays for eight Senators who were investigated for their role in Trump’s effort to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election:

“The Senate’s Republican Majority Leader, John Thune, just tucked one of the most blatantly corrupt provisions for political self-dealing and the plunder of public resources ever proposed in Congress into the GOP’s spending bill.

“If it were to pass, this astounding provision would give eight Republican Senators a personal payday of at least one million dollars each paid for directly by U.S. taxpayers. This jackpot is being set up at the same time Republicans throw millions of Americans off Medicaid and deny millions more a tax credit that helps make premiums for health insurance more affordable.

“The provision, which significantly is retroactive to 2022, allows ‘any United States Senator’—not any citizen, mind you, and not even any Member of Congress, but ‘any Senator’—to receive $500,000 from the taxpayers if the Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoenas their phone bill without giving them notice and then an extra $500,000 if DOJ seeks a lawful non-disclosure order from a federal judge. That’s a cool one million per Senator. 

“But these Senators want to get paid a pirate’s treasure simply for having their call records turned over by their phone company in response to a lawful subpoena, subject to a lawful non-disclosure order signed by a federal judge, as part of a lawful criminal investigation. To be clear, there was no ‘phone tap’ or eavesdropping on the content of their conversations. The call records subpoenaed were the kind of information you see on a phone bill—a list of calls made and received. 

“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. 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.

“If we believe that citizens should receive notice when the government subpoenas their phone bill, great! Perhaps this revolutionary new policy—which civil liberties groups would probably support—should be the law. But then the law should protect the civil liberties of all 320 million Americans, as the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution demands, not just the 100 Americans in the Senate who seem to have forgotten that they are nothing but the servants of the American people and not a royal class of oligarchs who float above the law that applies to everyone else. 

“This multi-million-dollar self-care package is designed to soothe the feelings and feather the nests of Senators whom Donald Trump, Rudy Giuliani, and their co-conspirators worked to enlist in their criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Following the evidence, including calls made by Rudy Giuliani to these Senators on and around January 6, 2021, Special Counsel Jack Smith sought a few days’ of their phone bills through completely lawful subpoenas. Chief Judge James Boasberg, the federal judge first nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush (and who now faces impeachment calls from Trump allies), authorized lawful non-disclosure orders to protect the integrity of the investigation. 

“If these Republican Senators have a complaint, it should be directed to President Trump and his accomplices who worked to drag them into a criminal conspiracy to overthrow a presidential election that Trump had lost by more than seven million votes, 306-232 in the electoral college. But these United States Senators are pathetically casting themselves as victims and propose to give themselves a million-dollar jackpot payday at taxpayer expense. Their sneaky little midnight rider turns U.S. Senators into a protected caste that sits way above the law and the rest of the population, like their hero, the self-dealing President.

“However you feel about the rest of this bill, no Member of Congress should vote for this stunningly corrupt and self-dealing measure tucked into the bill for the personal benefit of a tiny group of Senators.” 

###