How Trump is Stalling the Senate’s Most Popular Bill

Will the GOP stand up to Trump on Russia sanctions?

🎙️ Programming alert: I’ll be hosting a Substack Live conversation at 10 a.m. ET this morning with Rep. Jake Auchincloss, a young Democratic congressman from Massachusetts who has carved out an interesting place in the party.

We’ll be talking about the future of the Democratic Party: what went wrong in 2024 and how the party is trying to build back going forward, including among young voters. As the New York Times put it, Auchincloss is a “Democrat who is thinking differently,” so I’m looking forward to picking his brain and hearing his diagnosis.

An email will be sent out when we start — but here’s the link to join us:

Now, onto today’s newsletter…

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On the surface level, much seems as it was in 2017: Donald Trump is in the Oval Office, Democrats are demoralized, Republicans control the House and Senate.

But there are countless ways to show that things are different, and here’s one.

In the summer of 2017, congressional Republicans thought it was necessary to sanction Russia. So, they did. In a sweeping fashion, the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act passed the House in a 419-3 vote on July 25 of that year, and then passed the Senate in a 98-2 vote two days later.

The package not only slapped new sanctions on Russia in response to its interference in the 2016 election and its 2014 invasion of southern Ukraine, but it also took steps to restrain President Trump from being able to ease the sanctions without congressional review. A Republican-led Congress handcuffed a Republican president, with barely any dissent in either chamber.

Trump was not happy about the measure: the bill was “seriously flawed,” he said, limiting “the executive branch’s authority to negotiate.” (As proof of why his should be the negotiating branch, he added a crack at his own party’s leaders: “Congress could not even negotiate a healthcare bill after seven years of talking.”) But he still signed it into law — “for the sake of national unity,” he claimed, although in reality, Congress had forced his hand. The package had passed with veto-proof majorities in both the House and Senate; to reject the bill would only have been to face an embarrassing defeat from his own party.

Flash forward to 2025.

Once again, congressional Republicans want to sanction Russia, this time for even greater sins: mounting an invasion to take over not just part of Ukraine, but the whole country. Once again, a bipartisan bill exists that would do just that. But, this time, the bill is in a holding pattern: instead of using their own leverage to force Trump into supporting it, Republicans are now only willing to advance the package if it receives Trump’s blessing at the outset.

By the way, when I say a “bipartisan bill,” I mean it. The Sanctioning Russia Act, authored by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), has 81 sponsors or co-sponsors: 40 Republicans and 41 Democrats.

Do you know how many bills are so popular that they get 80+ senators as co-sponsors? I checked. So far this year, there have only been seven:

• A resolution honoring President Jimmy Carter, who died in December

• A resolution honoring Sen. Alan Simpson (R-WY), who died in March

• A resolution honoring Sen. J. Bennett Johnston (D-LA), who died in March

• A resolution honoring Sen. Kit Bond (R-MO), who died this month

• A resolution designating May 4-10 as “National Small Business Week”

• A resolution designating May 11-17 as “National Police Week”

• And the Sanctioning Russia Act

To gain this level of support in the U.S. Senate, a measure usually has to be either honoring someone who has passed away or naming a week after something like small businesses or the police. This is the most popular substantive piece of legislation currently in Congress — and it still can’t get a vote, because Trump hasn’t yet signed off on it.

That’s how much has changed in eight years.

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Like its 2017 counterpart, the Sanctioning Russia Act would be no minor punishment on Moscow or its backers.

The package would require the president to impose a 500% tariff on Russian oil and natural gas and a 500% tariff on “all goods or services imported into the United States” from any country that “knowingly sells, supplies, transfers, or purchases” Russian oil and natural gas.

The bill would also impose sanctions against Vladimir Putin and a slew of Russian officials, all Russian oligarchs, Russian banks, all foreign suppliers of the Russian army, and any global financial communications services providers that don’t terminate services for Russian banks. American financial firms would also be prohibited under the measure from investing in Russian state-owned companies and American individuals would be prohibited from investing in the Russian energy sector.

Importantly, the final section of the bill says that the president can only terminate the aforementioned sections if he certifies to Congress that Russia has “verifiably ceased” its efforts “overthrowing, dismantling, or seeking to subvert the Government of Ukraine” and “entered into a peace agreement with Ukraine.”

In short, while President Trump prefers to have all the tools at his disposal to either negotiate with or punish Russia, at his own discretion, this Republican-authored bill would limit his options and require that he impose significant sanctions on Moscow until a Ukraine peace deal is struck.

Trump has yet to offer support for the bill, although as his patience with Putin appears to wane, Senate Republicans are growing louder in pushing him to embrace the package.

After Russia hit Ukraine with 367 drones and missiles on Sunday, the largest one-day attack of the entire war, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Putin has “gone absolutely CRAZY!” (“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him,” Trump added.) In another missive, Trump said that Putin is “playing with fire,” appearing to threaten Russia for carrying on the war without naming any specific consequences.

Russia doesn’t seem to be taking Trump’s threats very seriously: “Trump’s message leaves little room for misinterpretation,” RT, the Russian state media network wrote on social media. “Until he posts the opposite tomorrow morning.”

A chorus of conservatives are urging Trump to put real teeth behind his threats by backing the Russia sanctions package. “I believe president trump was sincere when he thought his friendship w Putin wld end the war,” Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) wrote on X. “Now that being the case ITS TIME FOR SANCTIONS STRONG ENUF SO PUTIN KNOWS ‘game over.’”

“Time for a GOP Senate Revolt on Sanctions Against Putin,” the Wall Street Journal editorial board, perhaps the last redoubt of anti-Trump conservatism, declared, urging the Senate to pass the sanctions bill and “force the President to face the hard reality of Mr. Putin’s ambitions that Mr. Trump would rather avoid.”

Graham responded in a letter to the editor, promising that “the Senate will act” if Putin “continues to play games.”

“I’m not looking to anyone else for guidance on this. I’ve waited long enough,” Sen. Todd Young (R-IN) told Semafor, calling for a vote on the bill with or without Trump’s support. “And it’s pretty clear to me that Putin has been jerking us around for months, and I don’t think the United States of America should tolerate that.”

But Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), who controls the Senate calendar, has signaled that he will only put the bill (which he supports) up for a vote if Trump gives the green light. “If Russia is not willing to engage in serious diplomacy, the Senate will work with the Trump administration to consider additional sanctions to force Putin to start negotiating,” Thune said last week.

Not exactly a definitive statement that a bill backed by 80% of his chamber is about to get a vote.

It’s not unusual for lawmakers of the president’s party to defer to the White House on whether to push forward with a bill. But it’s also not unusual — or, at least, it used to not be — for lawmakers to push a president of their own party when they felt it was warranted by the circumstances, as the example from as recently as 2017 shows.

Now, like a phantom limb trying to move after it has been amputated, some senators are searching for the muscle memory of standing up to the White House, only to find that the political will to do so has largely dissipated. Whether the sanctions bill moves forward poses a test of the Senate politically, but also constitutionally: sanctions, like tariffs, are a province that has mostly moved to the executive branch in recent years; voting on the Sanctioning Russia Act, like the passage of the 2017 sanctions bill, would be an attempt to snatch back some power for the legislative branch.

It is also a test of the Senate’s rules. As I’ve written previously, a handful of small congressional reforms could go a long way in loosening up our political system and moving things through the legislative process again. For example, if a bill is supported by a supermajority of 80+ senators, perhaps it should be guaranteed a floor vote — but under the current rules and norms of the chamber, the decision to schedule a vote is left up to the Majority Leader.

Then, if a bill passes with supermajority support in one chamber, perhaps it should be guaranteed a vote in the other chamber as well, a way to avoid situations like last year’s House bipartisan tax deal (which passed 357-70 in the House but then went six months without being considered by the Senate) or the Ukraine aid package that passed 70-29 in the Senate and then went months without being taken up by the House).

If this many senators have signed their name onto something, why shouldn’t it at least be given the chance to become law? The backers of the National Small Business Week resolution can thank me later.