by Steve Milloy, E&E Legal Senior Policy Fellow and Junkscience.com Founder
As appearing in the Daily Caller
President Trump campaigned on “ending the Green New Scam.” That’s the trillion dollar-plus climate spending in Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. The repeal of the pointless and inflationary subsidies should be a no-brainer layup for congressional Republicans. The opportunity to do so is coming up as part of the President’s much-anticipated Big Beautiful Bill. But now there’s drama.
The Inflation Reduction Act passed in August 2022. Not a single Republican in the House or in the Senate voted for it. The bill was able to avoid filibuster in the Senate because the Senate Parliamentarian controversially determined that it qualified to be considered under the Senate’s reconciliation process. Even so, the IRA only passed Congress because then-Vice President Kamala Harris cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate.
The good news is that, because the IRA was enacted by reconciliation, it can also be repealed by reconciliation. That is exactly how Republican leadership plans to pass the Big Beautiful Bill, possibly as early as Memorial Day. The problem is that, while all Republicans seem to want to pass some sort of Big Beautiful Bill, not all want that bill to repeal the Green New Scam.
A group of at least 21 Republican House members, none of whom voted for the Inflation Reduction Act in August 2022, signed a March 9 letter to Speaker Johnson warning against repealing the subsidies. “We have 20-plus members saying, ‘Don’t just think you can repeal these things and have our support,’” Rep. Andrew Garbarino (R-N.Y.), who organized the letter, told Politico.
