What a week in the House of Representatives! Surprise articles of impeachment against Pete Hegseth, a sweeping new Russia sanctions bill passed at the eleventh hour (about which more below), and—per new reporting from the Washington Sun¹—a giant blowup fight between GOP factions over suspending the gas tax to try to rein in costs and cool down an irate public ahead of the midterms.

Freedom Caucus Chair Andy Harris wanted the suspension; Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chair Sam Graves reminded him how ferociously he’d opposed the same idea when the Biden administration had sought one in 2022. This went over poorly. Harris started shouting and banging the desk: “This is fucking war!” Then he and his allies stormed out of the room. Later, one of them took to Twitter to call Graves an “Establishment elitist” who was “fighting hard” to bring “the swamp” back. Here come those midterms! Happy Thursday.

Congress Just Gave Trump a Bigger Tariff Hammer. Yes, Really.

by Andrew Egger

The House of Representatives is getting out of Dodge early today, Speaker Mike Johnson’s last small favor to Donald Trump of the year—and perhaps of his speakership.² But on their way out the door yesterday, the House passed one last piece of major legislation: a strong new sanctions bill on Russia that was the baby of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham.

The bill is a jumble—fascinating, encouraging, and infuriating all at once. It’s an unambiguously pro-Ukraine piece of legislation that will punish Russia hard for its war of aggression. Last year, when Trump and JD Vance were delivering their infamous Oval Office sandbagging of Volodymyr Zelensky and Trump was routinely parroting talking points Vladimir Putin was whispering in his ear, it would have seemed absurdly Pollyannaish to think the administration would eventually back such a pro-Ukrainian package. Yet here we are.

So far, so good. But there’s trouble. The bill doesn’t just place mandatory sanctions on Russia’s leadership and energy and defense industries. It also grants Trump sweeping new powers to indulge in his favorite hobby: tariffing the shit out of international trade. When Trump signs the bill, he will acquire the discretionary authority to place tariffs of up to 100 percent on countries that are top importers of Russian energy. If you want to know how Trump was wheedled into backing unambiguously pro-Ukraine, anti-Russia legislation, these shiny new tariff powers surely have a lot to do with it.

Now, you could make the argument that this is a useful geostrategic tool—that choking off Russia’s war economy is a worthy aim and any tariffs Trump might deploy to that end are at least partially to the good.

But for starters, as Catherine Rampell noted last month, the bill “doesn’t force Trump to use his existing sanction powers” because of the mile-wide exceptions—and it doesn’t give him any new sanctions powers, either. The only new powers are the tariff powers.

Moreover, the tariffs-as-sanctions logic completely ignores the way Trump has actually deployed his tariff powers so far. Over and over, the president has taken tariff authorities that are supposedly narrow in scope and used them to wage his personal Maximum Trade War around the world. Ever since the Supreme Court slapped down his “liberation day” tariffs, ruling that he couldn’t simply place any tariff on any country for any reason, he’s been trying to recreate his sweeping protectionist trade regime piecemeal, using any tariff authority he can reach. Many of these have been obviously pretextual: In July, with one temporary authority expiring, Trump grabbed another, imposing tariffs on 60 countries supposedly due to forced-labor concerns.

For years now, Trump has been exploiting a simple fact: The lawmakers who created our various tariff authorities over the last century never dreamed that a tariff-crazed president would try to stitch them into a patchwork quilt heavy enough to smother global trade. Today’s Congress has no such excuse; they’ve seen Trump’s tariff crusade. The fact that they just handed him yet another suite of broad tariff powers is nothing short of insane.

To their credit, many House Democrats realized all this. While Senate Democrats backed the sanctions bill en masse, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries spearheaded his party’s opposition in the lower chamber, arguing that the good end of Russia sanctions did not outweigh the perils of the bill’s tariff provisions. Even some Republicans were getting antsy about them as the vote approached: CNN reported yesterday that more than a dozen GOP House members were lobbying at the eleventh hour to strip the tariff provisions from the bill. Johnson’s leadership team—of course!—refused.

Now, look: I’m not saying this was an easy call. I can at least see how some lawmakers, Republicans and Democrats alike, weighed up the tradeoffs and decided that placing a few more arrows in Trump’s tariff quiver was worth it to get him onside on Ukraine. That’s probably why some Democrats voted for it—the bill won 86 votes in the Senate and 262 in the House.

But I can’t help recoiling from how ludicrous it all is. Didn’t we all just live through 2025? Don’t we all remember Liberation Day? Haven’t we seen how eager Trump is to throttle the U.S. economy while chasing fantasies of “trillions of dollars coming into our country” in hallucinated foreign investment? It’s like Trump’s recent appetite for real war has led us to forget how insatiable his appetite is for trade war. I’d long since resigned myself to the fact that Congress wasn’t going to bring Trump’s tariff powers to heel. But even I didn’t think they would actually gear up—on a bipartisan basis!—to give him even more.