The 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 ...