WASHINGTON — Two weeks after Graham’s Washington National Cathedral memorial, the Senate voted 86-11 Thursday to pass the legislation bearing his name, a package of economic weapons against Russia and Iran that Graham spent the last months of his life pushing across a skeptical Capitol Hill.
The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act imposes direct sanctions on Russian leaders, their families, and oligarchs, and authorizes targeted tariffs against the five countries that import the most Russian oil and gas. India and China, the two largest buyers of Russian energy since 2022, sit at the top of any such list. Senate Majority Leader John Thune framed the vote as the arithmetic of war. “As long as Putin has Russian oil and gas money, he’s able to continue this war,” Thune said. “What this sanctions bill would do would basically cut that off.”
Darline Graham, the former South Carolina attorney general whom Gov. Henry McMaster appointed to fill her brother’s Senate seat last month, announced the bipartisan deal on July 28, less than two weeks after Lindsey Graham died at 71 from what his staff described only as a brief and sudden illness. That a senator who had served for roughly a fortnight helped finalize a bill named for the brother she was appointed to succeed is a particular kind of Washington symmetry, one that says something about the velocity of grief in the capital and the persistence of a hawk’s legislative agenda after he is no longer present to defend it.
The bill traveled a complicated path to final passage. Trump, who had been kept informed of negotiations, demanded last-minute additions extending Iran sanctions authority before he would signal support. Those additions, which give the administration broader authority to limit Tehran’s access to weapons financing and energy revenue, appeared in the final text, reflecting a familiar Trump dynamic: extracting additional executive authority from legislation before allowing it to advance. The result is a bill that began as a Russia measure and arrived at the final vote covering Russia and Iran simultaneously, broadening its scope at the cost of complicating the political coalition behind it.
The bill’s primary economic mechanism targets Moscow’s oil revenue indirectly. Rather than prohibiting Russia from selling oil, the legislation makes buying from Russia legally and commercially costly for countries that want to maintain access to American markets. The five largest importers of Russian oil and gas, a list currently anchored by India, China, and Turkey, would face targeted American tariffs on their exports if they continue purchasing Russian energy at current volumes. Senate advance of the bill on July 30 cleared an earlier 86-12 procedural threshold; the final 86-11 tally suggests that for most members, the political cost of opposing a bill named for a recently deceased colleague outweighed whatever reservations they had entered the week carrying.
Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky voted no, arguing the bill hands the president tariff authority no Congress should delegate to any executive. Several Democratic senators echoed that concern while voting yes, explaining they concluded the direct sanctions mechanisms outweighed the risk of giving the White House expansive discretion over trade. NBC News reported the bill’s passage and its transmission to the Republican-controlled House, where leadership offered no public timeline for a vote and several members known for skepticism of Russia sanctions legislation have not indicated their positions changed.
The United States and its European allies imposed successive rounds of sanctions on Russia following the beginning of the Russian military operation in Ukraine in 2022, targeting individual oligarchs, Russian financial institutions, and export controls on military-relevant technology. Those measures displaced significant portions of Russia’s pre-war trade, but Moscow adapted, routing energy exports toward India and China in place of European buyers who had cut off purchases. The Graham bill is designed to close that workaround by making the alternative buyers themselves face a cost for their purchases. The Congressional Budget Office has not completed a cost estimate for the tariff provisions.
Russia’s military operation has extended into its third year against a Ukrainian defense sustained by Western materiel but unable to recover territory lost in the conflict’s early months. Trump has recently characterized the war as something that “can’t go much longer” without a negotiated settlement, framing that sits in some tension with peace talks between Washington and Kyiv and with legislation designed to intensify economic pressure on Moscow. Whether the House resolves that tension by moving quickly or quietly shelving what the Senate passed 86-11 is the one question Thursday’s vote did not answer.
