There is bipartisan fury in Congress today over stealth legislation offering million-dollar windfalls to a handful of senators whose office phone records were accessed as part of the federal investigation into the Jan. 6 melee. The idea, quietly slipped into the government reopening measure approved earlier this month, is so patently offensive that even the deeply divided House has voted unanimously to repeal it.

The Senate has, predictably enough, dragged its feet on taking up that repeal. Upon returning to Washington on Monday, senators should all feel the wrath of their constituents until they do.

The awfulness of this idea isn’t just that, as regular Americans struggle with inflation and service cuts, a few privileged senators would land seven-figure payouts from the government that already employs them. Pretty much everyone not in line for one of those payouts agrees that the very notion is an obscenity.

But what’s just as bad is that this measure is yet another attempt by MAGA allies to falsely rewrite the history of Jan. 6. They are, not for the first time, trying to minimize the crimes of the thugs who attacked the Capitol that day — and the president who egged them on — while villainizing those who subsequently and reasonably sought justice.

Jan. 6, 2021, marked the worst domestic attack on American democracy since the Civil War. Thousands of President Donald Trump’s supporters, primed by his relentless lies about a “rigged” 2020 election that he clearly lost, broke into and overran the Capitol, costing lives, for the specific purpose of preventing the peaceful transition of power.

The House impeached Trump. When the Republican-controlled Senate, to its eternal shame, refused to convict him, then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell explained that it was up to the criminal justice system to hold Trump accountable. Trump “didn’t get away with anything yet,” McConnell predicted back then.

He was wrong. Special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by President Joe Biden’s Justice Department to investigate the Jan. 6 attack, had to end the investigation when Trump was reelected to office last year, due to a standing policy prohibiting prosecution of a current president.

It was during his investigation in 2023 that Smith obtained subpoenas for the office phone logs of eight senators with potential involvement in Trump’s attempt to prevent certification of the election. The senators, including Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., were formally informed of the subpoenas earlier this year.

The subpoenas were signed by a federal judge, along with orders that the phone services postpone any notification of the targeted senators. Such information-gathering is commonplace in criminal investigations. And the information consisted only of call logs showing dates and phone numbers, not the content of phone conversations.

Nonetheless, the senators whose records were obtained have alleged nefarious intent, in keeping with the ironic MAGA trope of “lawfare” against Trump and his allies while Biden was president.

It’s ironic because Biden properly stayed out of the legitimate probe into the crimes of Jan. 6. Trump, conversely, has openly abused his power this year to deploy retribution, firing lawyers involved in the Jan. 6 investigation and publicly demanding (and getting) contrived criminal charges against other perceived enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey. Trump and his movement are nothing if not projectionists.

Earlier this month, as Congress cobbled together an agreement to reopen the government, Senate Majority Leader John Thune added a provision based on that phony allegation of Democratic “lawfare”: It would smooth the path for the eight senators whose records were obtained to sue the government for $500,000 per “instance” of having their records obtained without notification. It could be an effective payday of $1 million each, depending on the definition of “instances.”

Senate members’ offices can be reached through the Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121.

— St. Louis Post-Dispatch