The House of Representatives has passed sweeping sanctions legislation targeting Russia and sent it to President Donald Trump’s desk, honoring the late Republican South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham in the process.
The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 cleared the House by a vote of 262 to 159. The bill would take direct aim at Russian leadership, banks and the country’s oil “shadow fleet” by requiring Trump to slap tariffs of up to 100 percent on goods from the top five importers of Russian oil and gas, and tariffs as high as 500 percent on goods imported from Russia itself.
The legislation sailed through the Senate on Aug. 7 in a lopsided 86-11 vote, but it faced a rockier path in the House. Speaker Mike Johnson had previously told The Washington Examiner that he wanted broad bipartisan buy-in before bringing it to the floor, saying he would only move forward if the White House was on board.
“There should be bipartisan consensus,” Johnson said. “It should be a suspension-level vote where we could put it on the floor and have more than two-thirds support it. But I need to make sure the Democrats will be with us on that, and we got to build consensus around it.”
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise acknowledged Republicans were still hashing out details before the vote. “We’re working through it. We want to bring it, but not sure exactly when yet that decision has not been made,” Scalise said. “We’ve got a few folks that we’ll be talking to still about it.”
Support for the bill split along some notable lines. Hawkish Republican senators including Arkansas’s Tom Cotton, Armed Services Chair Roger Wicker and Foreign Relations Committee Chair Jim Risch backed the measure, as did Senate Majority Leader John Thune, who called it a “great tribute” to Graham.
But House Democratic leaders, including Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Foreign Affairs ranking member Gregory Meeks and Ways and Means ranking member Richard Neal, argued the bill would hand Trump excessive new tariff powers. “House Democrats are rock solid in our support for Ukraine, but the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia And Iran Act would do more harm than good,” the lawmakers said, warning it could raise prices for Americans while failing to mandate direct sanctions on Russia.
Republican Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie signaled opposition as well, telling Politico in late August, “Haven’t seen it. Haven’t heard about it. All I can say is in 14 years I’ve never voted to sanction a sovereign country.”
China and India are expected to bear the brunt of the sanctions as the top buyers of Russian energy, while Iran’s inclusion, added at Trump’s request, is expected to have limited impact given decades of existing sanctions.
Democratic Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a co-sponsor, pushed hard for the bill’s passage, telling “Face the Nation” it was a “moment of extreme urgency” that could cripple the flow of revenue to Putin’s war effort.
Graham first introduced the bill in April 2025, but it stalled for over a year amid White House demands for greater waiver authority. His sister, Republican South Carolina Sen. Darline Graham, reintroduced it on July 16.
