Fifty-eight Democrats in the House of Representatives voted with Republicans Wednesday to grant US President Donald Trump additional war and tariff powers, including the authority to put tariffs as high as 100 percent on goods from China and India.
The 58 House Democrats included former Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, former Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina and former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer of Maryland, who co-wrote the bill in the House.
The vote is only the latest expression of the fact that the Democrats, far from opposing Trump’s program of global war, support escalating it and criticize Trump for being insufficiently aggressive against Russia.
The majority of House Democrats, who voted against the bill, fully support the sanctions against Russia and Iran, and the ongoing wars but objected to giving Trump additional tariff authority.
The bill is named after the warmongering Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who died suddenly in July after returning from a trip to Kiev. It comes amid a spiraling escalation of the Ukraine war. On Sunday Russian forces struck a passenger train with a drone at Yahodyn station, 2 kilometers from the Polish border, shortly after a train carrying former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had left it.
On Tuesday Polish Defense Minister Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz announced that soldiers of the 18th Engineer Regiment were reinforcing the checkpoints and border guard posts on the Ukrainian border; and on Thursday Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, in a provocative speech to parliament, accused Russia of planning drone or rocket strikes on Poland and other countries supplying Ukraine. Early Tuesday an Italian fighter jet flying for NATO shot down a drone carrying an explosive charge over Lithuania, and Poland and Romania scrambled jets against Russian drones near their borders.
The Russian strike was the response to months of NATO escalation: Germany’s lifting of range restrictions on the weapons it supplies to Ukraine, Germany’s agreement in Kiev in May to build “deep-strike” drones jointly with Ukraine, Ukraine’s attacks on oil refineries in Perm and Tatarstan on September 7, and the visit of Johnson and other European officials to Kiev.
The sanctions and tariffs are instruments of the US-NATO war against Russia in Ukraine, and the bill turns them against China and India, two of the largest buyers of Russian crude oil.
It also extends for five years the US sanctions on the energy and arms industries of Iran, which the United States and Israel attacked on February 28 and which US warships are blockading.
Hellbound and Down 