A Russia sanctions bill that sailed through the US Senate just last month is now stalled in the House and unlikely to move before the November election, as lawmakers in both parties grow wary that the measure would widen President Donald Trump’s tariff powers and drive up oil prices.
According to Bloomberg, the mounting opposition marks a win for the retail industry and the US Chamber of Commerce, which have stoked fears on Capitol Hill that the Bill would arm the Trump administration with fresh legal justification for broad tariffs – recasting the standoff as a business-lobbying development as much as a partisan one.
That is a marked shift from where things stood a month ago. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 cleared the Senate 86-11 on August 7, named after the senator who died pushing it across the finish line. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy lobbied for it in person, the Secretary of State publicly demanded it, and the House co-sponsor list read like a bipartisan foreign-policy roll call. Yet a month on, it has no scheduled House vote, and a growing number of members say that it may not move until the lame-duck session between the November 3 midterms and the new Congress convening in January 2027.
Here’s why a Bill that looked unstoppable in August is now stuck – and what it would actually do to Russia if it ever reaches the President’s desk.
What the Bill would do
At its core, the legislation would hand the White House discretionary power to impose tariffs of up to 100 per cent on goods from countries that keep buying Russian oil, gas, uranium and other key commodities – rather than sanctioning Russia directly, it threatens the customers still trading with Moscow. Analysts at Steptoe note that the tariff authority would extend to the top five importers of Russian oil and gas, the top five countries facilitating sanctions evasion, and any nation that knowingly increases its Russian crude or gas purchases going forward. The Bill would also widen the existing US sanctions regime against Russian entities and individuals tied to the war, and it gives the President authority to waive penalties if he certifies doing so serves the national interest – a safety valve that helped it clear the Senate in the first place, after Senator Rand Paul’s amendment to strip the tariff power outright was defeated.
How it’s meant to squeeze Russia
Russia’s war economy leans heavily on energy exports, and secondary tariffs would make it commercially painful for India, China and others to keep buying discounted Russian crude, forcing them to look elsewhere and starving the Kremlin of revenue. However, the evidence so far cuts against that theory. India’s Russian oil imports have grown from under 0.2 per cent of its crude supply before the war to 35-40 per cent, and Indian refiners reportedly increased Russian purchases even after Trump’s existing 50 per cent tariff penalty took effect – the opposite of the intended deterrent. Ukraine’s sanctions envoy, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, counters that tariffs are harder to dodge than sanctions because they hit trade flows directly rather than relying on lists that can be evaded through intermediaries. That disagreement, whether tariffs close the loophole or merely add another one, is at the heart of why the Bill has stalled.
Five reasons the momentum died
The emotional urgency has faded. The Senate vote happened in the shadow of Graham’s funeral, with Zelenskyy watching from the gallery hours after a closed-door appeal to senators. That combination of grief and symbolism produced a lopsided vote shaped as much by the moment as the substance. Weeks later, in the House, that urgency was gone. House Rules Chair Virginia Foxx said flatly that nobody had even raised the Bill at a chairmen’s meeting as members returned from summer recess.
The House majority can’t absorb defections. Republicans hold the chamber by the barest of margins – 218 seats to 212, with one independent, out of 435. Speaker Mike Johnson does not have the cushion the Senate enjoyed. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) has said he hasn’t voted to sanction a sovereign country in fourteen years, and other Ukraine-sceptical conservatives admit they haven’t reviewed the Bill at all. Defence hawk Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska), by contrast, has called failing to pass it “a failure” – exposing the split within Johnson’s own conference before Democratic votes even enter the calculation. If Johnson loses more than a handful of Republicans, he needs Democrats to reach 218, or a full two-thirds (290 votes) if leadership instead fast-tracks it under suspension of the rules. Either route requires building a coalition the Senate never had to assemble.
Tariff authority is a red line for key Democrats. House Foreign Affairs Committee ranking member Greg Meeks (D-New York) and Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal (D-Massachusetts) argue Trump already has enough legal authority to sanction Russia without new tariff powers. Meeks has sharpened that case, telling The Hill that Trump’s own conduct toward Moscow, including hosting Russia’s foreign minister at the G20, shows the administration cannot be trusted with broader tariff discretion. He and Rep. Don Beyer put that objection in writing after Senate passage. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries says his caucus hasn’t taken a formal position, while Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden have joined Meeks and Neal in urging Trump to rely on existing powers instead.
The election calendar is working against it. The House is consumed by government-funding fights in a shortened autumn session, and Republican leaders confirmed on September 3 that they are cancelling the final two weeks of the pre-election session entirely. Meeks has said he does not expect a vote before the midterms, preferring to negotiate through the campaign so members can act once election pressure eases. Even the Bill’s own supporters cannot agree on tactics: Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland) wants the Senate version passed unchanged, while Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (D-Pennsylvania) says he would back it with or without the tariff provisions – but neither has proposed a strategy for forcing a vote before time runs out.
The Bill’s own deterrence logic looks shaky. Even setting politics aside, India’s continued and growing appetite for discounted Russian crude undercuts the case for urgency, and sceptics point to that pattern as evidence the tariff mechanism doesn’t work either – while the Bill’s architects insist tariffs are precisely the tool that closes the gaps sanctions leave open.
How the Senate and House differ – and why that matters here
The Bill’s journey exposes a structural difference between the two chambers. The Senate is built for broad coalitions: 100 members, elected statewide to six-year terms, where major legislation typically needs 60 votes to overcome a filibuster (though this Bill passed on an up-or-down vote once floor time was secured). A 22-vote cushion, as Graham’s Bill got, is well above what’s needed and reflects genuine bipartisan buy-in, amplified by the emotion around Graham’s death.
The House runs on a different logic entirely: 435 members elected district-by-district every two years, which makes individual members far more sensitive to local and primary-electorate pressure than to national symbolism. Passage there requires only a simple majority (218 votes) but Republican leadership’s wafer-thin margin means that it cannot lose more than a handful of its own members without needing Democratic votes to make up the difference, something the Senate’s 86-11 margin never forced anyone to negotiate. The alternative path, suspension of the rules, skips committee process entirely but demands a two-thirds majority (290 votes), a bar that is hard to clear when a sizeable chunk of each party has reservations for opposite reasons. That is the structural bind Johnson is in: too little Republican unity to pass it on party lines, and not enough Democratic enthusiasm to make up the gap easily.
Is the Bill dead?
Not necessarily. Its bipartisan Senate coalition, Ukraine’s active lobbying, and White House backing remain live pressure points, and Johnson could still be forced to act if Zelenskyy travels to lobby the House directly, as several members have urged. But barring a shift in the political weather, all five pressures point towards delay rather than passage – and in an election year, delay often becomes its own kind of defeat.
