The Republican House and Senate sponsors of punishing sanctions legislation against Russia have settled on a new strategy: attaching the measure to the coming bill to keep the federal government open.
“Time is of the essence,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) said in a statement I’ve obtained. “We urge our colleagues to consider attaching this legislation to the CR” funding the government.
Citing Trump’s pledge Saturday to enact “major Sanction on Russia” when NATO countries stop purchasing oil from Moscow and levy tariffs on China, Graham and Fitzpatrick characterized the president’s vow and their legislation as “joint action with Europe.”
Next week, the lawmakers said, they will urge colleagues “on both sides of the aisle to join us in advancing this legislation and standing with freedom against tyranny.”
Yet adding the measure to the continuing resolution, or CR, may be the only way to pass a package that Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Republican Leader John Thune have been reluctant, without President Trump’s explicit approval, to bring up as a stand-alone bill.
The gambit is, unsurprisingly, the brainchild of Graham, who has been pushing his colleagues and the administration for months to embrace a measure that would impose secondary sanctions on nations such as India and China that are effectively propping up Moscow’s wartime economy.
The idea is that by linking the measure to the eventual stopgap bill to fund the government, congressional GOP leaders could overcome the isolationists in their own conference, pressure Democratic Russia hawks otherwise uneasy about supporting the CR and move a major foreign policy bill without raising Trump’s ire.
Including the sanctions bill still may not be enough to win over any more than a handful of congressional Democrats to keep the government open, but it would still hand GOP leaders more leverage.
Graham spoke to Thune Saturday about the strategy, I’m told, and the Senate Republican leader responded favorably to the idea.
Thune is a traditional GOP internationalist and has long been open to the legislation, but has repeatedly said he wants to move it in coordination with the White House.
Graham’s hope is that he can at long last win Trump’s blessing for the sanctions bill if the Europeans can also be persuaded to take a harder line on China, the biggest buyer of Russian energy.
The South Carolinian spoke to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and a handful of other European leaders to brief them about his plan and to convince them that the way to nudge Trump toward confronting Moscow is by doing the same themselves with China and India. The president has already levied high tariffs on India.
“The way forward to keep Trump on your side is to join with him on China and India,” as Graham put it, before alluding to his secondary sanctions legislation, which Europe for months has been hoping Congress will pass. “If you love the Graham bill so much, why don’t you do one, too.”
Graham has 85 co-sponsors for his legislation, a remarkable bipartisan consensus, but the bill has languished for months.
Yet with Russia still refusing to negotiate a month after Trump invited Vladimir Putin to Alaska, where he pushed the Russian leader to hold a bilateral meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, congressional Republicans are growing increasingly frustrated with Moscow’s slow-walk of Trump.
“This is more than a matter of policy — it is a test of resolve,” said Graham and Fitzpatrick. “The free world must act, and America must lead.”
