How Congress Handed Trump Back His Tariff Weapon — This Time Aimed at Russia

Congress passed a bipartisan bill letting Trump impose 100% tariffs on Russian oil buyers, restoring power the Supreme Court had struck down in February.

On 16 September 2026, the US House of Representatives voted 262-159 to pass the Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 — informally named after the late Senator Lindsey Graham, who spent more than a year building support for it before his sudden death in July. The Senate had already passed it 86-11 the previous month. It now heads to President Trump's desk, and he is expected to sign it.

At first glance this looks like just another sanctions bill — Washington has passed dozens of these against Russia since its 2022 invasion of Ukraine. But this one is different, and the difference is tariffs. Buried inside the sanctions package is a provision that gives Trump the legal authority to impose tariffs of up to 100% on the five countries that buy the most Russian crude oil or natural gas, and on the top five countries that help Russia dodge sanctions. Countries importing less than 15% of their gas from Russia, and actively reducing that share, are exempt.

That detail matters enormously, because seven months ago, the Supreme Court had taken this exact power away from Trump.

To understand why this bill exists, you need the backstory. Shortly after taking office, Trump used a law called the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, or IEEPA, to impose sweeping tariffs on countries around the world — citing fentanyl trafficking and persistent trade deficits as the "emergencies" that justified it. IEEPA was written in 1977 to let presidents freeze assets and block transactions during genuine national security crises. It was never written to let a president set import taxes.

Several small businesses and a coalition of US states sued, arguing Trump had stretched the law far beyond what it says. Lower courts agreed with them. The case went to the Supreme Court, and on 20 February 2026, the Court ruled 6-3 that IEEPA does not authorize the president to impose tariffs at all. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, was blunt about it: based on two words in the statute — "regulate" and "importation" — Trump had claimed the power to tax any import, from any country, at any rate, for any length of time. The Court said Congress never gave him that.

The ruling didn't just strike down Trump's tariffs; it eliminated his main tool for using tariffs as a foreign-policy weapon. Republicans in the Senate then found themselves split on what to do next — some wanted a new, cleaner law that specifically gave the president tariff authority for genuine national-security purposes; others were wary of handing back power the Court had just taken away.

That is where the Graham bill comes in. Sanctions legislation targeting Russia over Ukraine had been sitting in Congress in various forms since the war began in 2022. Senator Lindsey Graham and Senator Richard Blumenthal, an unlikely Republican-Democrat pairing, had spent well over a year negotiating a version that could pass both chambers with a veto-proof majority.

The original draft was far more aggressive: a blanket 500% tariff on any country buying Russian oil or gas. As negotiations dragged on, the bill was reworked. The blanket tariff was narrowed to the top five importers of Russian energy and the top five sanctions-evasion facilitators, with the presidential discretion built directly into the statute rather than borrowed from IEEPA. Trump reportedly withheld his support for close to a year, coming aboard only after negotiators added a provision extending sanctions on Iran's energy and weapons sector for another five years — a change made at his explicit request, since the existing Iran sanctions authority was due to lapse on 31 December 2026.

The final bill, at 61 pages, does three things. It slaps fresh sanctions on Russian officials, oligarchs, banks and the so-called "shadow fleet" of tankers that Russia uses to move oil around Western price caps. It extends Iran sanctions for five years, with no presidential discretion involved — this part triggers automatically once Trump signs. And it hands the president a tariff weapon, legally distinct from IEEPA, that Congress itself has now explicitly authorized.

The vote broke unusual lines. In the House, 203 Republicans and 58 Democrats voted yes; seven Republicans and 152 Democrats voted no. Many Democrats who voted no did so specifically over the tariff provision — Representative Richard Neal warned during floor debate that nothing in the bill actually requires Trump to use the tariffs against Russia, and nothing stops him from directing them elsewhere, since the president alone decides which countries count as the "top five" at any given time. Two amendments that would have named the affected countries explicitly, removing that discretion, were both voted down in the House Rules Committee days before the final vote.

Here's the part that should catch the attention of readers well outside Washington: the bill does not name any country in its statutory text. It defines categories — "top five buyers of Russian oil or gas," "top five sanctions-evasion facilitators" — and lets the president decide, at any point, which countries currently fit those categories.

As of today, that list realistically includes China and India, both major importers of discounted Russian crude since Western nations cut most of their own purchases after 2022. Neither country is mentioned by name in the bill, but neither needs to be — the moment Trump signs it, his administration gets to decide whether India's oil purchases from Russia are large enough to trigger a 100% tariff on Indian exports to the US.

This is precisely the ambiguity that worried its Democratic critics. A sanctions bill aimed squarely at funding Russia's war machine has, almost as a side effect, created a new and broad instrument of trade pressure that can be pointed at any of America's major trading partners, allies included. European nations that still import Russian energy — Hungary being the most visible example — are technically exposed too, though most European governments have been quick to voice support for the bill rather than concern about being its target.

Estonia's ambassador to Washington, Hannes Hanso, captured the mood among most European allies: the bill isn't perfect, but the priority is getting tough sanctions on Russia moving quickly, even if the tariff mechanism used to do it is broader than anyone would design from scratch.

Trump is expected to sign the bill in the coming days. Once he does, two things happen immediately: the Iran sanctions extension takes effect automatically, with no further presidential action needed, and the tariff authority becomes legally available for Trump to use whenever his administration chooses.

Nothing about the bill forces Trump's hand on tariffs — he could, in theory, never invoke it. But the political logic points the other way. The administration has spent the past year explicitly using tariffs as the primary lever for pressuring adversaries and negotiating trade terms, and having just lost that ability at the Supreme Court, this bill hands it back in a form Congress has now blessed and the Court cannot easily strike down, since the authority now flows from an actual act of Congress rather than a stretched reading of an old emergency-powers statute.

For countries like India, the practical question is no longer whether Washington has the legal tool to tariff energy trade with Russia — it now clearly does — but whether, and when, the Trump administration decides to point that tool in their direction. Indian officials will be watching closely for any signal on how the "top five" list gets defined and how often it can change, since a designation made today could just as easily be reversed, or expanded, tomorrow, entirely at the discretion of one administration.

There's a practical layer to this story that often gets lost in the political drama of votes and court rulings: tariffs, in the end, are taxes paid at the border, and someone has to absorb that cost. Economic research into Trump's earlier IEEPA-based tariffs — including a widely cited working paper from Harvard economist Gita Gopinath and the University of Chicago's Brent Neiman — found that nearly all the cost of those tariffs was ultimately paid by American importers, not by foreign exporters as Trump has repeatedly claimed. Some companies absorbed the hit through lower profit margins; others passed it straight on to consumers through higher prices.

There is little reason to expect this new, Congress-approved tariff authority to behave any differently in practice, even though its legal foundation is now much sturdier. If Trump uses the power this bill grants him to impose a 100% tariff on, say, Indian goods on the grounds that India is among the top buyers of Russian crude, the immediate economic pain would land on US companies importing Indian goods and on Indian exporters losing access to the American market — not on some abstract notion of "Russia" losing money. The tariff is designed to punish countries for their energy relationship with Moscow, but its economic mechanics work through ordinary trade flows, which is exactly why critics worry about unintended collateral damage to unrelated industries and consumers on both sides.

The Supreme Court told Trump in February that he could not tax imports without Congress's explicit permission. Congress has now given him that permission — not through a standalone tariff law, but folded into a Russia sanctions bill that took over four years and a senator's death to finally pass. The tariffs are legally about Russian oil and gas revenue. In practice, they are a new lever Trump can pull against any country doing significant energy business with Moscow — a category that, right now, includes some of America's own trading partners in Asia.