House Passes Lindsey Graham’s Neocon Russia Sanctions Bill

Lindsey Graham says his new Russia sanctions bill “should be bipartisan consensus,” and that line alone tells you what kind of project this is. In Washington, “bipartisan” often means the usual suspects get together to look tough, spend political capital, and then hand the bill to Americans as a done deal. Bipartisan doesn’t equal smart, and it definitely doesn’t equal “America First.”

Yes, Russia is an adversary. Nobody needs a seminar on that. But Congress loves sanctions the way it loves resolutions: they feel decisive, and they cost lawmakers nothing personally. What they can cost is higher prices, more market chaos, and another round of unintended consequences that hit our manufacturers and families first. Sanctions are not a substitute for strategy, and this town has a bad habit of confusing paperwork with results.

The “neocon” label gets thrown around too easily, but Graham has earned his reputation the hard way: he’s almost always shopping for the next escalation, the next moralizing showdown, the next forever-commitment that ends with Americans footing the bill. House passage is the easy part. The hard part is explaining, in plain terms, what this actually accomplishes and how it avoids dragging us deeper into someone else’s war. If the answer is “trust us,” then no, it shouldn’t be consensus.

Here’s a simple test Congress never seems to apply: does this bill help the American worker, strengthen our energy position, and give the next president room to negotiate from strength? Or does it lock the country into a rigid posture that satisfies cable news and the foreign-policy crowd? Stop treating “tough” as a policy. If lawmakers want to move fast, they can start with securing our border, rebuilding our industrial base, and making sure America’s leverage comes from real power, not another press release.