November 12, 2025
The longest government shutdown is now over. After 43 days of the US government being closed for business and 54 days of the House of Representatives also being closed for business – House lawmakers just passed the bill the Senate passed on Monday night to reopen the government. And surprise – Senate Republicans snuck a little surprise in that bill that Speaker Mike Johnson said he was blindsided by because it could cost the American taxpayers millions of dollars. More on that in a second.
Final vote in the House tonight was
Now – this deal goes to President Trump’s desk for his signature. He is expected to sign it immediately. Once he does – the US government will be technically be reopened. Though of course the government isn’t usually open late at night. So in all reality things will go back to normal tomorrow morning. But things at airports may still be sluggish for a few days and you may still see cancelations and delays for the next few days. That’s because the Transportation Secretary said it’s going to take the system some time to resume normal operations after he ordered a 6% cut to air capacity at these 40 key airports nationwide. Secretary Duffy also said just because the government reopens doesn’t automatically mean air capacity will be restored to 100-percent. That’s because he said the air traffic controller shortage is real and it’s a problem. He said when the data says it’s safe to restore flight capacity he will. But he didn’t give a time for when that’ll happen.
Now – as I said at the beginning of this video — Senate Republicans snuck a little surprise into the so-called “clean” continuing resolution to reopen the US government. Obviously – adding this provision makes it by definition *not* a clean continuing resolution…but that’s a whole nother story.
So what is this provision? It was a last minute amendment attached to the CR by Senate majority leader John Thune – that specifically addresses special counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 investigation. Last month the FBI revealed that in 2023 special counsel investigators secured a subpoena to obtain phone record data from eight Republican senators and one republican congressman to look into the calls they made in the days before and after January 6th. Obviously Republicans were outraged that Jack Smith secured this subpoena got their phone records and did not inform them about it. They say this is clear weaponization of the Justice Department. Well now – this little amendment that was put into the bill to reopen the government allows those lawmakers to sue the US government for $500,000 per “instance” of what they see as secret data collection. This amendment is back dated to 2022. So all nine of these members of congress can sue over the smith subpoenas. If this provision becomes law – this could cost the American taxpayer millions of dollars because there could be multiple instances of data collection from each of these senators.
Here’s the problem with all of this – speaker Mike Johnson is not happy and neither are several other House Republicans. Johnson said he was basically blindsided by this amendment – he was upset that he was not told it was coming. But – despite everyone’s anger it was too late to strip this out of the bill before it passed tonight. Instead Speaker Johnson said he would work with other republicans to repeal that section.
See how your House Representative voted on this bill here.
Read the amendment here.
