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Many senators see no more fitting tribute to their late colleague Lindsey Graham than passing his bipartisan Russia sanctions bill as soon as possible. That doesn’t mean they’ll be able to do it.
“Slam dunks are getting tougher in the United States Senate,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., a supporter of the sanctions legislation, told Semafor.
Senators in both parties said Monday that they would like to hear President Donald Trump forcefully back the Russia measure before they move forward. A White House official said Monday that Trump supports the latest version, but the president himself hasn’t weighed in lately on the legislation Graham worked on for more than a year, until the days before his death.
Graham had repeatedly indicated Trump supported previous iterations of the legislation, though Trump’s lack of public comment on them resulted in Majority Leader John Thune keeping the bill short of the Senate floor.
“Lindsey had said some time ago that President Trump supports it, but that didn’t mean he was necessarily ready to pull the trigger on it … I don’t know that we ever completely got the green light,” Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., told Semafor.
“Maybe the president has greenlighted it. I don’t know,” Hoeven added. “But I think at the point he greenlights it, I think we’ll advance it.”
Even whenever Trump speaks out. Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., says he would “absolutely” fight efforts to move the legislation quickly, meaning it will take up significant floor time.
Several other senators told Semafor they have not reviewed the latest version of the Russia sanctions plan, which Graham and colleagues in both parties announced last week. Legislative text has not been publicly released.
The Russia sanctions measure is also competing for floor time with a must-pass defense policy bill and government spending bills that would prevent a shutdown.
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Sens. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., joined Graham in a Friday statement saying they would soon release legislation that would “exact a heavy price on those who buy Russian oil and natural gas, fueling the Putin war machine.”
Daines said he believed the bill contained an “additional tariff provision” in addition to sanctions on nations that buy fuel from Russia, but that he still needed to dig into the updated legislation.
A White House official told Semafor that “President Trump supports the bill.” That’s not quite enough for Democrats, who want to hear it from Trump himself.
“It is in the hands of one man. When President Trump believes it’s the right time, for whatever reason, to put an end to the Ukrainian war, to pay tribute to Lindsey Graham,” said Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who was close to Graham. “He needs to say that he supports it personally.”
Room for Disagreement
Paul said on Monday that passing a proposal to penalize China and India for buying Russian oil would be “a great disruption to trade and very dangerous to the world economy.”
Even scaling back the high tariffs envisioned in the bill could still “be a disaster for the world economy,” Paul added.
“Many people didn’t think through in advance of the Iran war what happens to the world economy when the Straits of Hormuz are threatened and continually threatened,” he said. “They should try to think in advance of unintended consequences.”
Burgess’s view
The sanctions bill has gone through several iterations but still commands a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. It had the votes to pass before Graham’s death.
But for all of the bipartisan mourning of the South Carolinian hawk, we’re seeing the aftereffects of Trump’s refusal to sign a housing bill that he endorsed.
Given that uncertainty, Republicans and Democrats alike want to hear Trump say he will sign the Russia sanctions bill before plunging into any debate.
Notable
- Passing the Russia sanctions bill was among the goals Graham joked about needing to achieve before his death in the hours before he died, Axios reported.