Perhaps faster rollout, and more immediate permitting reform, might have helped vindicate those principles and protect hundreds of billions in clean-energy tax credits. But the apparent demise of the I.R.A. looks like a case study in post-material politics, the thermostatic law of public opinion and the principle that whenever the G.O.P. has to choose between anything at all and tax cuts — in this case, tax credits for the green transition and tax cuts that could be partly paid for through their repeal — it’s never really a choice at all. Republican support for more solar power has fallen to 61 percent today from 84 percent in 2020, according to Pew. Back then, nearly two-thirds of Republicans wanted to prioritize renewable buildout. Today, it’s fallen to one-third.
A new immigration police state
The second is on immigration, where the policy bill promises to allocate $155 billion in funding for border control — five times the amount allocated to the border overall in 2025, even though cross-border flows have recently fallen by more than 90 percent since surging in 2023. Since Inauguration Day, Trump’s border policy has been horrifying and brutal, and over the weekend in Los Angeles, the raids looked like provocations designed to produce a pretext for further crackdowns — by the National Guard and potentially U.S. Marines. But although the images are appalling, the numbers have not been especially large — particularly compared to promises from Trump on the campaign trail to deport tens of millions if elected. Boosting border security spending by more than a hundred billion as illegal border crossings collapse is one big logistical step toward actually pursuing that goal at scale, rather than just performing I.C.E. cruelty as a kind of political consolation prize.
Force-feeding school choice
And a third plank of the bill is, if not the most eye-catching, nevertheless telling — the commitment to establishing school voucher programs across all 50 states.
You may think that school vouchers reflect the basic ideological drift of the country, but for more than half a century, every single time they are put to a democratic test, the public roundly rejects them. In 2024, such initiatives were defeated in three states — Colorado, Kentucky and Nebraska — two of which also went for Trump by huge margins. This pattern is not a new one. Since 1967 — 1967! — no single state referendum in favor of school vouchers has passed anywhere in the country. And yet, in the past few decades, 33 states and the District of Columbia have all enacted voucher programs, and just in the five years since 2019 the number of American students using vouchers has doubled.
This is not just a bad procedural look but a genuine democratic stain, made all the worse because the record of voucher programs is so abysmally bad, as Michigan State’s Josh Cowen documented last year in his cleareyed book “The Privateers: How Billionaires Created a Culture War and Sold School Vouchers.”
