While much of Donald Trump’s trade policy is an indefensible mess, the president’s approach to Brazil stands out as uniquely outrageous. In fact, it’s so outlandish that even some Senate Republicans voted to block the White House’s policy from continuing.

To recap briefly, Trump announced 50% tariffs on Brazil in July, not to address a trade deficit — the U.S. actually has a $7.4 billion trade surplus with Brazil — but because Brazil’s criminal justice system was pursuing a case against former President Jair Bolsonaro, whom Trump likes. The move marked the first time a U.S. administration tried to leverage trade policy to derail a criminal case in a sovereign nation.

When Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, was asked to justify the policy, he struggled mightily. A couple of days later, the president himself was asked a similar question, and he told reporters, “Because I’m able to do it,” which wasn’t exactly persuasive.

Three months later, a bipartisan Senate majority voted to reject the Republican’s gambit. NBC News reported:

Five Senate Republicans joined Democrats on Tuesday night in passing a resolution that would block President Donald Trump’s tariffs on billions of dollars of goods from Brazil. The legislative language blocks Trump’s emergency declaration that imposed tariffs on most Brazilian imports at 50%. The measure passed in a 52-48 vote.

Ordinarily, the leadership of the Senate’s GOP majority controls which bills reach the floor, but in this instance, Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia introduced what’s known as a privileged resolution, which the majority leader cannot block and which only requires a simple majority to pass.

It was a success: Every Senate Democrat voted for the measure, and they were joined by five Senate Republicans: Susan Collins of Maine, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Thom Tillis of North Carolina.

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There will be some who look at the vote total and scoff: There are 53 Senate Republicans, and 48 of them chose to go along with a White House trade policy that’s ridiculous on its face. (Asked before the vote why more of his GOP colleagues were not willing to support the measure, Paul told The New York Times, “Fear.”)

But I prefer to see the glass as half-full. In April, when a narrow, bipartisan majority in the Senate rejected Trump’s tariffs on Canada, a Politico report summarized it as “the most significant rebuke to Trump that congressional Republicans have yet mustered in his second term.”

And now it’s happened again. Indeed, since the vote in April advanced with 51 votes, the vote on the Brazil policy is arguably an even more significant rebuke, since it passed with a slightly larger majority.

For the White House’s critics, that’s the good news. The bad news is that the practical implications of the developments are likely to be limited: The measure now heads to the Republican-led House, which no longer does any work and is all but certain to ignore the resolution, even when it eventually returns.