The Russia Sanctions Bill Would Give the President Permanent, Unnecessary, and Almost Unfettered Tariff Authority

INTRODUCTION

From the moment President Trump announced his April 2025 “Liberation Day” imposition of tariffs on virtually all imports from the vast majority of the United States’ trading partners, the debate has raged over the separation of powers between the Congress and the President. The Constitution (Article I, Section 8) clearly grants to the Congress alone the power to “lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises.” Yet Congress has over the years delegated to the President some limited power to impose tariffs in specific circumstances and subject to certain procedural and substantive limitations. Recent weeks have seen yet more tariffs on allies, with the President dusting off another never-before-used-for-tariffs law (Section 338 of the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act) to impose 50% duties on more than $20 billion in imports from Canada. The U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) also announced new 10% and 12.5% tariffs on countries accounting for more than 99% of U.S. imports pursuant to Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974, an unprecedented use of the statute that far exceeds what Congress intended Section 301 to cover.

When many members of Congress believed the President had exceeded his authority byusing the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 (IEEPA) to impose his Liberation Day tariffs, they filed an amicus brief before the courts, contending that IEEPA was not a tariff statute, given the absence of the word “duties” or “tariff” anywhere in statute and the absence of the hallmarks of legislation delegating tariff power to the executive. The Supreme Court agreed, striking down Trump’s IEEPA tariffs. Its decision in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump reflects the Court’s understanding of congressional practice, noting, “When Congress has delegated its tariff powers, it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits.” It capped the amount and duration of tariffs and “conditioned exercise of the tariff power on demanding procedural prerequisites.” At no point, the decision continued, has Congress given “the President power to unilaterally impose unbounded tariffs,” which would “represent a ‘transformative expansion’ of the President’s authority over tariff policy, and indeed . . . over the broader economy as well.”

All of which raises the question of why Congress would want to walk away from that clear recognition of its power over the imposition of tariffs by enacting the Senator Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026. The reality is that while Trump has in recent months sounded a more hawkish public line on Russia, he has so far imposed sanctions on only a handful of companies over Russia’s ongoing war against Ukraine, far fewer than the hundreds of sanctions annually that the U.S. imposed between 2022 and 2024. The bill contains numerous commendable provisions to increase these sanctions, or at least to insist that this President use his sanctioning power, against the companies that are buying Russian energy, the banks that clear their payments, and the shippers, insurers, and other companies that facilitate Russia’s energy flows. But the bill also contains an unnecessary and nearly unbounded grant of tariff authority to the President at a time when the President has already been very aggressive in imposing tariffs on friend and foe alike.

These tariff provisions are unlike any others in the U.S. Code, giving the President enormous discretion to impose tariffs on an ever-expanding array of countries with little obligation to produce a public record of why he is doing so and no opportunity for Congress to overturn them. Moreover, the President’s public support for the bill, given his own reluctance to impose sanctions on Russia under existing law, suggests that Trump is mostly interested in the new tariff powers, raising the prospect that the practical impact of the bill will be to raise tariffs on Americans without meaningfully raising sanctions pressure on Russia.

To read the full policy brief as it was originally published by the Institute of International Economic Law, click here.