By Sara Albrecht | Sept. 2, 2026
(Washington Examiner: Op-Eds)
Congress should pass tougher sanctions on Russia. Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine should carry real consequences, and countries helping finance it through purchases of Russian oil and gas should not get a free pass.
The Senate overwhelmingly agreed. To its credit, it also improved the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act before passing it. The current legislation more carefully identifies which countries can be targeted and requires the executive branch to explain its methodology and justify the tariff rate it chooses.
Those are important guardrails. But before the House gives the President another major tariff power, it should finish the job.
Once a country falls within the statute, the President may impose tariffs of up to 100 percent on essentially every product that country sells to Americans. Congress requires the administration to explain the rate it chooses, but it does not provide a meaningful statutory standard for deciding whether that rate should be 10 percent, 50 percent or 100 percent. That is an extraordinary amount of discretion over American commerce.
I raise this concern from experience. For more than a year, the Liberty Justice Center has been on the front lines of litigation over presidential tariffs. We challenged the administration’s use of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to impose sweeping tariffs and ultimately prevailed at the Supreme Court. When the administration turned to Section 122 of the Trade Act, we challenged those tariffs too. And when that authority reached its statutory limit and another nearly worldwide tariff regime followed under Section 301, we went back to court.
The lesson for Congress is simple: write tariff laws for the President who will use every inch of the authority Congress grants, not for the President lawmakers hope will exercise restraint…
To continue reading this article on the Washington Examiner’s website click here.
To learn more about the Liberty Justice Center’s tariff cases click here.
The Liberty Justice Center is a nonprofit, public interest law firm that never charges its clients a dime. Support its work here.