WASHINGTON/NEW DELHI: The United States enters 2027 with a Republican president facing a Congress fully controlled by the opposing party for the first time since the 2007-09 session that passed the India-US civil nuclear deal. Democrats won majorities in both the House and the Senate in the November 3 midterm elections, picking up six Senate seats Republicans had held in Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, Ohio, South Carolina and Texas, according to the non-profit elections reference Ballotpedia, which tracked the results through the night. The non-partisan forecaster Decision Desk HQ projected Democratic control of both chambers; the exact final House tally was still being settled days after the vote.
The result restores what political scientists call divided government: a president of one party, a Congress of the other, for the remainder of Donald Trump's second term. The question for India is not whether this changes Washington's politics -- it plainly does -- but whether it changes the specific levers that reach New Delhi: tariffs, the H-1B visa system, remittances and the sanctions regime tied to Russian oil.
Before any new Congress is even seated, India is already operating inside a piece of federal law written for exactly this kind of leverage. The Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026 became Public Law 119-111 on September 18, 2026, after clearing the House 262-159 and the Senate 86-11. Section 113 of the Act lets the President raise tariffs by up to 100 percent on the five largest importers of Russian-origin crude oil and natural gas -- a list that includes India, the second-largest buyer of discounted Russian crude.
The tariff never actually hit India. On October 16, Trump invoked Section 115 of the same Act -- its presidential waiver clause -- in Executive Order 14436, certifying to Congress that a blanket waiver of the duties was in the national interest. The waiver has no expiry date; it stays in force until the President or the Secretary of State decides otherwise. That single clause is now the most consequential active lever India faces in Washington, and it sits entirely with the executive branch. A newly Democratic Congress gets a certification and a report under Section 115(b) -- it does not get a vote on whether the waiver stands.
A list of India-relevant bills introduced in the outgoing 119th Congress looked, on first pass, like a pending agenda for the new one. It is not. Under congressional rules, any bill that has not been enacted dies when a Congress ends; nothing automatically carries over to the 120th Congress that is seated on January 3, 2027. Each of the following needs a member to reintroduce it from scratch, and a new path through newly Democratic-controlled committees:
Likely to resurface: H.Res.880, introduced by Rep. Ami Bera (D-CA) with Rep. Joe Wilson (R-SC) in November 2025, a non-binding resolution reaffirming the US-India strategic partnership, the Quad and technology cooperation under the renamed US-India TRUST initiative. It carried roughly 24 cross-party cosponsors, per Bera's own release, and costs a Democratic majority nothing to pass. The Russia-sanctions oversight track built around the Graham Act is also likely to continue in some form, since Senate Banking and House Foreign Affairs both flip to Democratic chairs who will have jurisdiction to question how the Section 115 waiver is being used.
Unlikely to advance: the India Shrimp Tariff Act (Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-LA) and the Ag Disputes Act (also Cassidy), both aimed at Indian farm subsidies, lose their most direct path once Senate Finance -- the committee both were referred to -- gets a Democratic chair with no stake in a Republican senator's trade fight. The United States Reciprocal Trade Act (Rep. Riley Moore, R-WV), which would hand the President more tariff authority, runs directly against a Democratic Congress's institutional interest in checking the executive, not expanding it. The REMITTANCE Act (Rep. Chip Roy, R-TX), which would have pushed the existing 1 percent remittance tax to 25 percent, is unlikely to get a hearing from a Democratic Ways and Means Committee.
Already moot or overtaken: an earlier Senate sanctions bill, the Sanctioning Russia Act of 2025, and its 2026 Senate successor were effectively superseded once the House's companion track, H.R.5334, became law in September. A separate Senate bill carrying a similar short title was still sitting in committee with no floor action as of the midterms -- redundant once the substantive law was already on the books and already waived.
Divided government is not new to the India file. In 2007-09, a Democratic 110th Congress inherited the enabling Hyde Act that a Republican Congress had passed a year earlier, and still passed the implementing legislation for the civil nuclear deal with an 86-13 Senate vote -- a Democratic Congress finishing a Republican president's signature India initiative. In 1998-2000, a Republican Congress wrote presidential waiver authority for India-specific sanctions into the Glenn Amendment, which a Democratic president then used to normalise ties before his 2000 visit. Both are genuine bipartisan outcomes, but they are also close to the only two clean examples on record; the pattern runs on a small sample.
Other episodes show the opposite: durable India policy moving around Congress, not through it. The Obama administration's 2016 Major Defense Partner designation and the Defense Technology and Trade Initiative were executive joint statements, not statutes, built specifically because a Republican Congress left little room for new legislation. The 2019 withdrawal of India's trade preferences under the Generalised System of Preferences was a pure executive action under the Trade Act of 1974 -- Congress was notified, not consulted. And when Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Pramila Jayapal introduced resolutions critical of India's actions in Jammu and Kashmir in the Democratic-controlled House of 2019-20, both died in committee without a floor vote, while the strategic relationship itself continued untouched. The research institute Observer Research Foundation read that episode as the first visible gap between the Democratic Party's progressive wing, which raises human-rights objections to India, and its establishment wing, which backs the strategic partnership -- a gap that resurfaces whenever Democrats hold a chamber.
The Khanna-led push for a CAATSA waiver on India's S-400 purchase from Russia is sometimes cited as proof that India policy survives a change of House control. The underlying House vote, however, came in July 2022, while Democrats still held the chamber; what is confirmed is that the push continued into the Republican-controlled 118th Congress that followed, not that it originated under GOP control. Whether a formal waiver was ever finalised by the Treasury's sanctions office was not established in the record available for this piece and should be read as unconfirmed.
November 2026 to January 2027: the outgoing Republican Congress finishes its business, including the FY2027 defence authorisation bill, while the Graham Act's India waiver stays in force under EO 14436 with no sunset date. The 119th Congress's India-specific bills lapse unless enacted before January 3.
2027 legislative session: watch which bills get reintroduced and under which committee gavels. The anti-India trade bills lose their most direct route once Senate Finance and House Ways and Means flip to Democratic chairs with no reason to carry a Republican senator's agricultural trade fight; the Russia-sanctions oversight track, by contrast, gets real jurisdictional teeth, since Senate Banking and House Foreign Affairs can summon officials to explain how and why the Section 115 waiver is being renewed or withdrawn.
2027-28, structurally: none of this changes the arithmetic of a presidential veto, which requires two-thirds majorities in both chambers to override -- a bar divided government rarely clears on a trade or immigration question. The levers that actually touch India right now -- the Graham Act waiver, the roughly $100,000-plus H-1B petition fee set by presidential proclamation in September 2025, and the 1 percent remittance excise tax already written into law under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act -- are executive or already-enacted, which is precisely where a Democratic Congress has the least direct power to act, and the most oversight leverage to make noise.
The honest reading of the record, not a prediction: a Democratic Congress takes the sharpest anti-India bills off the near-term agenda, and gives the strategic relationship's institutional supporters in both parties -- the Bera-Wilson resolution's roughly two dozen cosponsors are a reasonable proxy for that bloc -- a louder platform. It does not, on its own, give India protection from the pressures that already sit outside Congress's reach: a tariff waiver that one proclamation created and one proclamation can end, a visa fee set by the same mechanism, and a remittance tax that is now the law of the land.