Today, the Senate passed the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 by a vote of 86–11, sending it to the House. The package includes authority for the president to impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on goods from the top five importers of Russian oil and natural gas.
Scott Lincicome, vice president for general economics and the Stiefel Trade Policy Center at the Cato Institute, issued the following statement on the bill’s passage:
Today is a big and unfortunate step backward for bipartisan efforts to reform a US tariff system that, as we’ve seen repeatedly since 2018, already gives far too much power and discretion to the executive branch. If the policies in this bill become law, the president – and his successor – could impose high and uncertain taxes on Americans importing goods from a wide range of countries, not just a few bad actors. I’m heartened to see a third of the Senate acknowledge the grave risks these proposed tariff powers raise, but there’s clearly more to be done to educate the rest of Congress on why granting the president new and almost-unbridled power to unilaterally tax millions of Americans is a very bad idea.
Lincicome is available for interviews on the bill’s tariff provisions, the broader fight over executive trade authority, and what that vote signals about congressional appetite for reform. Please contact Cato PR at pr@cato.org.
Related Commentary:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.