Today President Trump signed into law a bipartisan bill that imposes harsh sanctions on the regimes in Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Russia, you may recall, is the gigantic fading petrostate that has cleverly endeavored to level the international playing field by, among other things, hacking the bejesus out of the 2016 presidential election and helping to install a bumbling foreign-policy neophyte who fits neatly into Vladimir Putin's breast pocket as president of the United States.

In a detail that I'm quite sure is unrelated, Donald Trump is very upset that Congress is doing something to be mean to Russia. From a press release the White House published in conjunction with today's action:

[T]he bill remains seriously flawed—particularly because it encroaches on the executive branch’s authority to negotiate. Congress could not even negotiate a healthcare bill after seven years of talking.

[Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan angrily open their mouths in unison to say something before glancing at each other, deeply sighing, and crawling back into the bunk bed they share]

By limiting the Executive’s flexibility, this bill makes it harder for the United States to strike good deals for the American people, and will drive China, Russia, and North Korea much closer together. The Framers of our Constitution put foreign affairs in the hands of the President.

Well...kind of, yeah! But enacting sanctions against a hostile foreign entity is not exactly a revolutionary exercise of congressional power, even if Donald Trump just learned about it while reading Simple English Wikipedia last night. What is unique about this bill is that it provides that if the president wants to ease any of these sanctions on Russia during the course of any diplomatic negotiations in which he may be involved, Congress reserves the right to review and approve any such waiver first. Notably, this safeguard does not apply to the measures taken against Iran and North Korea, probably because lawmakers are less concerned that President Trump might be, um, compromised on those fronts.

Yet despite its problems, I am signing this bill for the sake of national unity.

Translation: "I hate this so, so much, but Mr. Kelly told me I absolutely have to sign it, and he can be really scary when he tells me what to do, and he even took away my giant novelty VETO stamp and hid it somewhere on the White House grounds after I fell asleep watching TV last night, so I'm settling for this tepid expression of my reservations accompanied by a vague, perfunctory reference to patriotism."