Congress Might Be About to Hand Trump Sweeping Tariff Powers

The Lindsey Graham Sanctioning Russia Act, which the House will likely vote on this week, looks like a no-brainer for supporters of Ukraine who have been calling for President Trump to get tougher on Russia.

A large majority of America’s existing sanctions on Russia, which target thousands of government officials and companies, are currently enforced by executive order, meaning that the president can remove them whenever he wants.

The Graham bill would turn those sanctions into law: If Trump wanted to end them, he would need Congress’s approval.

It also targets a few Russian officials and companies by name, further reducing Trump’s discretion.

These provisions help explain why the late Senator Graham, one of Ukraine’s strongest defenders in Congress , originally championed the bill.

President Volodymyr Zelensky himself has urged legislators to pass it, as have more than 30 national-security and foreign-policy experts who argue that it’s in Kyiv’s best interest.

But the bill is not what it seems.

The legislation would impose no significant new sanctions on Russia, and it would allow Trump to waive any of its measures simply by claiming that doing so is in the national interest.

In other words, a law that appears to handcuff Trump would offer him a key to free himself.

What’s more, its most important provisions are about not sanctions per se, but tariffs.

The bill could provide Trump with the same kind of sweeping authority to impose tariffs that the Supreme Court took away from him in February, allowing him to intensify his trade war with many of America’s allies and partners.

The legislation would give the president authority to impose levies of up to 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian crude oil and the five largest importers of Russian natural gas, which include China, India, France, Japan, Hungary, and Slovakia.

It also allows him to impose tariffs on the five countries that are deemed to be the biggest facilitators of Russia’s evasion of oil sanctions—a vague provision largely subject to presidential discretion. (There are a few carve-outs for the natural-gas category, but not for the others.) [ Read: Russia’s real strategy in Europe ] Peter Harrell, a trade lawyer who served in the Biden administration, told me that the bill “gives Trump much more flexibility on tariffs than traditional tariff laws.

There are no guardrails or restrictions.” The simplest reading of the legislation suggests that Trump can impose tariffs on only the countries that appear in the various top-five lists.