One of the greatest challenges in crafting effective legislation is the innumerous unintended consequences and ways in which loopholes and deliberate exemptions can be wielded in unexpected and unintended ways to change the effective impact of a bill or simply render it ineffective. Can Gemini Deep Research help legislators and their staffs think creatively about the loopholes and affordances in their bills and incorporate global history and outcomes of similar bills over time to craft better, more effective legislation? Let's ask Gemini Deep Research to perform a detailed strategic analysis of the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia Act of 2026 (S. 5025) bill to explore scenarios under which it might not achieve its intended goals and ask Gemini to recommend legislative fixes that would strengthen it against those possibilities.
This is the prompt we used with Gemini Deep Research:
You are an international sanctions expert and legal analyst. Read the attached proposed sanctions bill and think deeply, carefully and creatively. Identify all of the ways that if this bill becomes law, that countries that violate it could be exempted, bypass or otherwise avoid the sanctions or impact of sanctions it outlines. Place close attention not only to the ways the bill explicitly allows sanctions to be avoided/exempted, but also to all of the loopholes, exemptions, vagueness and other means you can find or think of in this bill and its enforcement that could allow a country to avoid/be exempted from sanctions. Go beyond the text of the bill to think of how it would be enforced, ways that countries could work around it, etc. Look at how countries have avoided, been exempted or otherwise escaped the impact of sanctions in the past. Even if a country is sanctioned under this bill, think of ways they could escape or minimize its impact on their economy by looking at history. Finally, make detailed recommendations of changes to the bill that would prevent all of the scenarios above and sure that countries cannot escape or be exempted from sanctions or minimize their impact.
And the resulting report: