Abstract: The subject of the study is phraseological syntactic construction, having structure-forming elements "is not up to"  as permanent ones. Given phrase scheme as a third essential component includes a noun in the genitive, the specifics of the functioning of which in the Political discourse is the high frequency of the use of proper names, namely the names of countries, capitals, and names of political and state leaders. The phraseological construction serves to express the meaning of the subject's detachment from the object and is complemented by modal shades of uselessness and impossibility. The great pragmatic potential of the construction is manifested in the fact that it can be used in colloquial speech, in literary texts, and journalism. The functioning of the structure in newspaper texts is manifested in the semantics of the subject distributor of the structure, as well as in the semantics of the variable nominal component. The study used the methods of contextual and communicative analysis (the use of syntactic structure in the journalistic text), component analysis (description of the lexical content of the variable components of the structure). The novelty of the work is due to the identification of the specifics of the functioning of colloquial phraseological structure in newspaper articles (based on the texts of the National Corpus of the Russian language and electronic publications of the Russian-language Internet). The main functions of the studied phraseological sentences with "is not up to" is the function of pledge; attracting the reader's attention to issues that are ignored but are topical; expressing the author's opinion, forecasting events.