Congress, having watched a president spend the better part of two years running legal obstacle courses just to impose tariffs on a whim, has apparently decided the solution is to stop making him run the obstacle course. A bipartisan Senate bill named after Lindsey Graham would hand the president explicit statutory authority to slap tariffs of up to 100% on any major importer of Russian energy. Yes, they are doing this on purpose.
What the Bill Actually Does
According to Axios, the legislation is a Russia sanctions package that has pulled in overwhelming bipartisan support in the Senate. In its current form, it would allow President Trump — and, critically, every president who comes after him — to impose tariffs of up to 100% on countries that are major importers of Russian energy.
That is not a typo. One hundred percent. Double the price of anything coming in from a country that keeps buying Russian oil and gas. The bill is named for the late Senator Lindsey Graham, which feels appropriate given that Graham spent years being whatever the political moment required of him, and this bill is nothing if not flexible.
The tariff authority would give the White House considerably more room to raise import taxes on major economies, Axios reports. The specific mechanism matters here: this would not be the president stretching some dusty Cold War statute until it groans. This would be Congress, with full awareness of what it is doing, writing the president a blank check with a lot of zeros on it.
The Legal Mess This Is Trying to End
Here is the context that makes this move remarkable. Axios frames the bill as the next chapter in what it describes as a legal cat-and-mouse game over presidential tariff authority. Trump has been reaching for obscure, largely untested provisions to justify import taxes, and courts have been increasingly willing to push back on whether those legal hooks actually hold.
So Congress's answer is to stop the game entirely and just give the executive branch what it wants in writing. It is a remarkable institutional surrender dressed up as a foreign policy maneuver. Lawmakers who have complained loudly about executive overreach on trade are about to vote to supercharge that exact power, with bipartisan backing, because it is wrapped in a Lindsey Graham memorial package targeting Russia.
You almost have to admire the political judo. Nobody wants to vote against a Russia sanctions bill. Nobody wants to be the senator who killed a measure named after a recently deceased colleague. The tariff authority rides in the sidecar, and everyone pretends they mostly care about the sidecar.
Who Gets Hit and How
The targeting here is countries that import significant volumes of Russian energy, which is a list that includes some of the world's largest economies. China buys enormous quantities of Russian oil. India has dramatically ramped up Russian energy imports since the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. The bill would give the White House a legal cudgel to threaten tariffs against both of them, simultaneously, at rates that would be economically catastrophic if actually applied.
Whether that is a feature or a bug depends entirely on your theory of how this gets used. The optimistic read is that the threat of 100% tariffs gives American negotiators genuine leverage to squeeze countries into reducing their energy purchases from Moscow, which would meaningfully cut into Russia's war chest. The less optimistic read is that a future president now has a legally bulletproof mechanism to torch trade relationships with two nuclear-armed countries at any moment, for any reason, as long as they can point to Russian energy imports as a pretext.
The authority, once granted, does not come with a sunset clause that magically limits its use to the sensible scenarios its authors imagined.
Bipartisan Is Not the Same as Wise
The bill's bipartisan support is being treated as evidence that it is good policy. It is evidence that it is popular policy, which is a different thing entirely. Senators from both parties have been desperate to look tough on Russia since 2022, and this bill lets them stamp TOUGH ON RUSSIA on their foreheads while simultaneously doing something the current Republican president very much wants.
That alignment of interests does not mean anyone has done a serious reckoning with what they are building. Congress is writing a permanent expansion of executive tariff power into law, anchored to conditions that are broad enough to apply to a huge slice of global trade. Future administrations will inherit this authority. Future Congresses will find it very difficult to claw back.
The history of emergency powers handed to the executive branch in moments of political convenience is not a comforting one. They tend to stick around.
The Dingo Take
You are supposed to believe this is a Russia sanctions bill. And sure, it is that. It is also Congress voluntarily handing over one of its core constitutional powers — the power to set tariffs — with enough force to crater trade with the world's two most populous countries, wrapped in the name of a dead senator so it feels rude to object too loudly. That is not a coincidence of legislative drafting. That is a choice.
The bipartisan part should make you more nervous, not less. When both parties enthusiastically agree on a major expansion of executive power, it usually means both parties think they might want to use it someday. Democrats are voting to give Trump a 100% tariff cannon because they figure eventually they will get a turn with the cannon. That is how institutional norms collapse: gradually, then all at once, with everybody nodding along.
Here is what we are actually watching. A president spent two years testing the legal limits of trade authority. Courts started saying no. Congress's response was not to reassert its own oversight role. It was to change the rules so the president cannot lose in court anymore. If that sounds like a pattern, it is because it is a pattern. The branch that is supposed to check executive power just bought the executive a bigger lever and called it foreign policy.
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