House Republicans Are Ignoring the First Rule of Political Survival
It used to be that if you wanted to get reelected, you would never hurt the economy of your own district. The debate over clean energy subsidies shows how much has changed.
Don’t break Rule No. 1
Photographer: Ting Shen/BloombergThe House Republican drive to revoke federal tax incentives for clean energy is testing one of the most durable rules of Congressional behavior: don’t vote against the economic interests of your own district.
When the Democratic-controlled Congress passed, and President Joe Biden signed, the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022, the bill’s advocates thought that imperative would allow the law to generate its own defenses. The theory among the IRA’s supporters was that the legislation’s interlocked incentives to encourage both production and consumption of clean energy would become difficult to repeal once companies used them to build plants and create jobs around the country. Supporters hoped the IRA would become the environmental equivalent of the annual defense appropriation bill: a measure that was almost impossible to oppose because virtually every state and Congressional district benefited from some aspect of it.