A last-minute addition to the bill that finally reopened the government after its record-breaking shutdown has ignited fury among House Republicans, exposing cracks in party ranks over what many see as a self-serving grab by senators. Reports from closed-door meetings indicate even mild-mannered Speaker of the House Mike Johnson was “livid” when he learned of the last-minute addition.
The provision, slipped into the Legislative Branch appropriations bill, lets certain senators sue the U.S. government for damages tied to former special counsel Jack Smith’s January 6 investigation—codenamed “Arctic Frost.” It targets cases where the Department of Justice subpoenaed phone records without notifying the affected lawmakers, a move that reeks of the kind of unchecked surveillance conservatives have long warned about from federal agencies.
The clause specifically allows senators to seek up to $500,000 in compensation, but only for themselves—not for President Trump or everyday Americans who faced similar intrusions. This exclusivity has fueled accusations that it’s nothing more than an insider perk, funded by taxpayers, to settle personal scores from the probe that ensnared eight Republican senators’ data through subpoenas to companies like Twitter (now X).
Lindsey Graham said, “Oh, definitely [if asked if he would file a lawsuit]… And if you think I’m going to settle this thing for a million dollars? No. I want to make it so painful no one ever does this again.”
Ted Cruz defended the insertion, telling Politico it was meant to give “real teeth” to protections against DOJ overreach. But not all senators are eager to cash in. Dan Sullivan has “no plans to sue,” according to his advisor, while Ron Johnson echoed that sentiment: “I have no plans at this time [to sue]… If I did sue, it would only be for the purpose of using the courts to expose the corrupt weaponization of federal law enforcement by the Biden and Obama administrations.”
On the House side, the backlash was swift and pointed. Speaker Johnson admitted he was blindsided: “I was just as surprised by the inclusion of that language as anyone. I had no prior notice of it at all… I was frustrated, as my colleagues are over here, and I thought it was untimely and inappropriate.”
He’s now pushing for a fast-tracked vote next week to strip it out, urging the Senate to follow suit.
Rep. John Rose, who introduced repeal legislation, called it out for its narrow focus: “The American people should not be asked to make compensation to United States senators, the ultimate insiders, if you will — who have been wronged, no doubt in my mind … this provision does not allow other Americans to pursue a remedy. It does not even allow the President of the United States, who was equally wrongfully surveilled and pursued by the Justice Department — they didn’t even include President Trump in this… They saved this special treat for themselves.”
Chip Roy didn’t hold back either: “Well, they heard them… I mean, you know, the lords don’t like to be told by mere commoners what to do. But we’re going to have to take a pretty strong stand on this one.”
Greg Steube went further, voting against the entire bill: “I’m not voting to send Lindsey Graham half a million dollars.”
The provision’s origins trace back to Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who added it at the behest of Graham and Cruz, with a nod from Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. Many senators claimed ignorance until the bill surfaced over the weekend, raising questions about how such a targeted favor made it through without broader scrutiny.
Marsha Blackburn, one of the affected senators, supports undoing it but plans to pursue a declaratory judgment instead: “This fight is not about the money; it is about holding the left accountable for the worst weaponization of government in our nation’s history.”
Democrats, predictably, piled on the criticism. Martin Heinrich fumed: “I am furious that the Senate Minority and Majority Leaders chose to airdrop this provision into this bill at the eleventh hour — with zero consultation or negotiation with the subcommittee that actually oversees this work… This is precisely what’s wrong with the Senate.”
This dust-up comes amid broader revelations about the “Arctic Frost” probe, where Smith’s team quietly scooped up lawmakers’ data without the usual alerts, fueling suspicions of a coordinated effort to target Trump allies. While the clause aims to deter future abuses, its Senate-only scope smacks of elitism, leaving President Trump and others out in the cold.
As House Republicans gear up for repeal, it serves as a reminder of how even within the party, the fight against deep-state tactics can get tangled in personal interests. With the government back open, the real test will be whether the Senate bends or digs in deeper.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
Rules and benefits for thee. None for us. Business as usual.
That’s what Republicans go to Washington for to feather their own nest so why would anyone be surprised at this. This is the reason that they don’t talk about Pelosi’s insider trading because they all do it one way or another.
johnson, do not even pretend you did not know this was going on, YOUR party has really betrayed us over the last couple months not only with this but H1B as well. I guess it really does not matter which party is in power, You thieves always win and we the taxpayers always get SCREWED.
Make the taxpayer liable for everything, as much as possible
Boy that will show them
Why don’t they make their money honestly like insider trading. 500,000 dollars is chump change just ask Nancy
Most in CONgress put self before country. It’s why we have government shut downs and $37 TRILLION in debt, and it costs the Mint more money to make a penny than what is worth.
That’s great, what is he doing about it. Mike being livid does nothing for the rest of us.
Making the appeal of the provision. It might have also already been filed. Not sure.
He is the Speaker of the House not the Senate.
I read this differently.
Put it in there, let everyone freak out because it excludes all of us.
Take it out, include us.
I like it.
A bunch of hypocritical self serving elitist politicians. No wonder nothing gets done. Why bother voting anymore. We send them an overwhelming mandate and they can’t even get that done.
The solution to the Arctic Frost problem and others like it is to put the people who did it in JAIL and throw away the key. And I’d make them pay for their room and board while locked up. That is what will deter bad behavior.
Exactly. The only solution is criminal. This is just more theft from a corrupt government. I had great hopes for Trump, but as soon as he abandoned DOGE and stabbed Elon in the back, I felt like we were in trouble. When he did a complete 180 on Epstein, I knew we were. I really hoped he wouldn’t be an Israeli puppet because of his personality, but he’s caved worse than any previous president to the Zionist plague.
Actually, it’s quite the window into those participants ethics.
Very disappointing they wrote it only and merely for themselves.
Republican Party wants money. “Democratic” Party wants power. Proven time and time again…
Why is anyone shocked what domestic terrorist do in last min of anything they put their hands on.
Lindsey Graham – always looking out for himself.
Why do they, and even the J6 prisoners, keep suing taxpayers and not the individual offenders in DC? Nancy Pelosi is guilty of insider trading. Period. Yet they just whine about it and pretend they need another law to prevent what is already against the law everywhere.
Nancy Pelosi is also guilty of heading up the J6 Fedsurrection. Wray, Garland, Mayorkas, Cheney, the J6 Committee, dirty judges and DAs, cruel wardens and guards and lying witnesses…ALL INDIVIDUALLY GUILTY, not taxpayers. Yet we get hit with lawsuits paying for their personal crimes. Sick of it. Let Lindsay Graham sue JACK SMITH and WRAY and GARLAND and BIDEN and OBAMA. They are the culprits! And we taxpayers are bailing them out instead of prosecuting them. Sick of it!
I am a little confused. How is the Justice Department going to be punished when taxpayers will foot the bill for their mistake? Republicans had the wind at their back but now they are going to be labeled as opportunists for sneaking this provision into the bill but to open the government. Their grievances should be addressed separately.
This is the kind of action that makes me delete text messages from WinRed and the GOP fund raisers. STOP!
No. I want to make it so painful no one ever does this again.”
You mean with the taxpayers money. The taxpayers should throw all of you traitors out.
I would like to know who is responsible for the language in the CR bill banning Hemp products.
Why the Hell should we taxpayers be made to pay for Dirty, Crooked, Illegal President “Auto-Pen” Joe Biden and his crooked DemocRAT party’s illegal Arctic Frost investigation. Offended parties should file lawsuits against Biden and the DemocRATs, DNC, etc. for their illegal violations perpetrated by them. They are the ones who committed the illegal, unconstitutional activity – NOT the American taxpayers.
Not good enough that their rich off insider trading.
Why the hell did the House sign the bill? They apparently DO NOT read the bills prior to signing. This should be a good lesson for these idiots to READ what they sign. These Senate Clowns protected themselves out of greed and selfishness while leaving American citizens out of their money grab. Maybe they shold take the money from their insider trading.
I would think all the money laundering going on with the Ukraine arms and $ packages have provided enough for the corrupt DC criminals destroying the US but they are determined to clean the country out of every printed USD before it collapses.
This is why bills should only contain items pertaining to the purpose of the bill. No add ons for other concerns, taxes, benefits, etc. Single purpose bills only. I have never understood why this was allowed. I know why Congress does it – to persuade and maintain their power BUT it’s wrong. It should be dealt with once and for all.