The Ukraine Bill That House Dems Have No Intention of Passing

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Inside Washington

The Ukraine bill that House Dems have no intention of passing

For years, Democrats in both chambers of Congress could reliably agree on support for Ukraine. But now, House Democrats are pushing back against a Russia sanctions bill that sailed through the Senate in July, frustrating their colleagues in the upper chamber. The issue? House Democrats say it gives too much power to President Trump.

Representative Gregory Meeks of New York, ranking Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, thinks, in lieu of this particular sanctions bill, the Senate should pass a bipartisan bill that the House in June. That legislation provides more aid to Ukraine and expands sanctions on Russia but does not include sweeping tariff authorities for President Donald Trump.

“The Senate is not superior to the House. We both pass bills, so we should be discussing both bills and making a determination what would be the best bill to support Ukraine,” Meeks told reporters on Tuesday.

The Senate legislation—named for the late GOP Senator Lindsey Graham—passed in the upper chamber with a final tally of 86–11, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy for the vote. The measure allows Trump to impose new tariffs on countries that import Russian oil, and imposes punishing sanctions on Russian President Vladimir Putin and other Russian officials and institutions.

The was introduced after roughly a year of negotiations with Trump to get to a point both he and a bipartisan majority in Congress could accept. Senator Richard Blumenthal, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and co-sponsor of the bill, has urged his colleagues in the House to support the measure.

“It is a moment of extreme urgency, for the reason that Putin may try to escalate, but also because Putin is on his heels economically,” Blumenthal on Sunday.

But key House Democrats say giving Trump further tariff authority could be unwise, given the president’s retributive trade wars with U.S. allies. They argue that Trump only agreed to the bill because it included a provision that allows him to waive any sanctions, as long as he justifies it as in the “national interest.” Given that Trump has expressed an affinity for Putin, some Democrats worry that Trump might remove sanctions on Russia instead of adding to them.

Representative Don Beyer of Virginia told The New Republic on Tuesday that Russia has enough “kompromat” on Trump that even if the measure did pass, the president wouldn’t actually take action against Putin. “He’ll just break the law and wait for someone to sue him,” Beyer said.

Blumenthal has said that, while the bill allows for sanctions on Russia’s trading partners, it would not affect European allies, because it carves out certain exceptions. Senator Raphael Warnock, who had initially held up the bill in the upper chamber, was assuaged by Trump trade representative Jamieson Greer’s promise to lift tariffs once countries are no longer purchasing Russian oil and gas.

“If you give [Trump] an inch, he will take a mile. We don’t have to imagine. We are seeing it in real time,” said Warnock on the Senate floor in August. “But this commitment that we were able to get from Ambassador Greer is meaningful, because if the president ignores the law, if he oversteps his power, we will see him in court.”

House Democrats aren’t convinced. Meeks noted that the provision to allow Trump up to 100 percent tariffs on the largest importers of Russian oil could include the European Union.

“I’ve heard Mr. Blumenthal and others say, ‘Oh, it won’t affect our allies.’ He says, ‘It won’t affect our European allies,’ but it’ll affect the EU. Who’s the EU? Our European allies,” argued Meeks. He believes the Senate measure looks good on paper but would allow Trump to waive sanctions on Russia rather than impose them.

“You look at the mess we have with Canada, and how many allies we’ve pissed off because of stupid tariffs, and the impact on consumers—he just can’t be trusted,” said Representative Linda Sánchez of California. Representative Richard Neal of Massachusetts has also expressed opposition to the Senate bill.

Zelenskiy’s top aide on sanctions, Vladyslav Vlasiuk, is meeting with House Democrats in an effort to sway their opinion on the measure. Meeks said Tuesday he was looking forward to speaking with him but that he believed his own legislation would be better for supporting Ukraine.

This entire disagreement may be moot: The House’s major priority this week is passing a continuing resolution to keep the government funded through mid-December. The House will be out next week for the Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah recess. It’s possible that they’ll decide not to return to Capitol Hill at all until after the November elections; Congress is already skipping town for the month of October to campaign.

Beyer said that even if the House did return the week after next, he wasn’t sure there would be time for any action, although he’d heard talk of a potential amendment to limit Trump’s tariff authority. A similar amendment failed in the Senate.

“The person who was telling me about writing the amendment also thought that Trump would still hate it, because he and [White House trade adviser Peter] Navarro want carte blanche tariff authority,” he said.

Despite the disagreement between Senate and House Democrats, Beyer said he hasn’t gotten too much guff from his Senate colleagues about opposing the bill.

“No one’s beating me up on it,” he said. “People are asking about it, they’re asking why, but nobody’s pressuring me to change my mind.”

—Grace Segers

Outside Washington

The San Francisco Chronicle that “more than two dozen immigrants, mostly green-card holders with past arrests, have been held at San Francisco International Airport this year without access to dedicated medical care, attorneys, or even beds for more than three days,” turning the airport into a “de facto immigration detention center.” Among other examples detailed in the Chronicle’s lengthy investigative report, staff writers Sara DiNatale and Christian Leonard recount the case of a “67-year-old diabetic” who has “been legally in the country for 50 years” but was pulled off a flight by immigration agents and “detained for eight days earlier this year without a way to check his blood sugar.” Democratic Representative Kevin Mullin, whose district includes SFO, reportedly demanded access to the Customs and Border Patrol facility at the airport after learning of the Chronicle’s investigation and was first (illegally) turned away before being admitted, six days later, to find five people in the “holding room.” He told the Chronicle that agents on-site “were not hiding from the fact this is a definitive policy shift from the Trump administration.”

The most quietly, boringly goofy story of impropriety this year has come to a close: Rhode Island State Representative Julie Casimiro has resigned her seat, following outcry at her continuing to draw a salary despite having moved to South Carolina in July. “Although state lawmakers only meet for the first six months of the year,” the Rhode Island Current’s Nancy Lavin, “their taxpayer-funded salary is spread across the entire calendar year.” That $20,922 salary amounts to “$800 every two weeks, plus health insurance.” Would that every these days could end so anticlimactically. Rhode Island’s primaries, which will include three candidates competing for Casimiro’s seat, take place September 9.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

The Ideas Factory

Thursday at noon, the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication hosts a live webinar on “how public opinion is affecting data center development.” YPCCC director Anthony Leiserowitz will moderate a discussion with George Mason University Ph.D. candidate Neha Gour and Rewiring America’s Kristin Eberhard. RSVP here.

In case you missed it: Graham Steele has a blog post at the Roosevelt Institute in layman’s terms why Treasury yields and interest rates are up, what it means for the broader economy, and why the Trump administration’s responses so far haven’t worked. The bottom line: “At this point, there are no easy answers for how the U.S. government can pull itself out of the recurring cycle of market stress followed by chaotic policy responses,” writes Steele. But “a good place to start would be restoring the U.S. government’s reputation as a reliable and respected domestic and international actor committed to the rule of law and financial stability.” Continuing on the current course, he concludes, risks broad economic collapse.

—Heather Souvaine Horn

In Closing

Book of the Week

The Time Tax: How the Government Wastes Our Time—and How to Fix It

By Annie Lowrey

THE GIST: Want a government benefit you are entitled to—at least theoretically? To get it, you will probably have to go through expensive and confusing paperwork, bureaucratic delays, meetings, and more. In The Time Tax, Lowrey explains how we got here and what we can do about it.PRAISE: Tim Wu in The New York Times that “Lowrey’s book joins what is a growing push to tackle the hassles and frictions that make people hate government. We’ve seen what’s possible. We just need the collective will to use the tools we already have.”

CRUISING THE INDEX: Lowrey traces the “time tax” back to the Civil War, when bureaucratic hurdles were put in place out of anxiety that the wrong sorts of people—often racial minorities—would gain access to benefits they didn’t “deserve.” Bureaucracy may be utopian in theory, promising “order, fairness, impartiality, and predictability,” Lowrey writes. But the experience of it is more like Dante’s hell: “a rigid, insuperable hierarchy: spendthrifts pitted against heavyweights, alchemists afflicted with sores, flatterers immersed in shit, and traitors encased in ice.”

TNR’S QUICK CRITICAL ASSESSMENT: Combining incisive history with empathetic, wide-ranging reporting, one of the best policy writers in the country pinpoints a problem all of us face too often—and outlines how we can finally fix it.

—Alex Shephard

Political Trivia Question of the Day

Aside from the Roosevelts, what other presidents were related to each other? Three pairs shared a last name. The fourth connection is considerably more obscure (hint: One was a Founding Father, and the other was one of our few Whig presidents). ( to find the answer in tomorrow’s newsletter.)