The thing about a tribute is that it honors what someone did. A man builds a bridge; you put his name on the bridge. You do not tear out two of the lanes and add a tollbooth and then hand the ribbon to his widow. That would be a different thing. That would be, in the technical parlance of institutional governance, a bill.
Sen. Lindsey Graham authored a Russia sanctions bill. It was bipartisan, which in Washington means it took roughly four times as long as a unilateral bill and emerged from the process looking like it had lost a fight with a photocopier. Nevertheless, it existed. It had a shape. The shape was: sanctions on Russia.
Now the President of the United States has called on Congress to amend this bill — as a tribute to Graham — by adding Iran to it. This is the tribute. The tribute is: take his thing and put a different thing in it. I once paid tribute to a chef by asking if the soup could also be a sandwich. He took it better than the soup did.
Let us follow the logic with the respect it deserves. Graham wrote a Russia bill. Graham is gone. Therefore, in his honor, the bill should also be an Iran bill. The chain of reasoning is airtight, if the chain is made of smoke. By this standard, we could honor Graham further by adding North Korea, a surcharge on imported cheese, and a provision requiring the Senate cafeteria to serve better soup. All in his name. All as tribute. The bill becomes a living memorial in the sense that memorials do not usually legislate foreign policy, but we are being flexible.
The President has not been assigned a seat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He has not been assigned a seat in the Senate. What he has is a podium, a social media account, and an apparently sincere belief that the correct way to honor the author of a document is to rewrite the document while the author is no longer in a position to object. In literary circles, they call that something. In Congressional circles, they are apparently calling it a tribute.
Graham spent decades on the Senate Armed Services Committee learning the difference between Russia and Iran. The kindest memorial to that career would be a bill that also knew the difference. But a bill that knows things is harder to amend than a bill that honors feelings, and feelings, unlike sanctions, require no markup hearing.