“How do we have any momentum to do anything else?” asked Representative Richard Hudson, Republican of North Carolina. “Without this bill, I don’t know how you do tax reform,” he said. If the bill fails, “it’s going to have negative repercussions for all of us.”…

Even if they can come together, House Republicans risk making the same mistakes Democrats made in the beginning of Mr. Obama’s term, when they pushed through what came to be known as Obamacare. That achievement, monumental at the time, ended up dragging down a once formidable Democratic majority and reducing the ability of Democrats to pass more legislation during his presidency.

Yet if the bill fails, Republicans in the House could end up like House Democrats under President Bill Clinton, who passed a controversial energy tax that was reduced to rubble in the Senate, but remained an albatross for Democrats in the 1994 elections.

The Democratic majority repeated that error in the early years of the Obama administration when the House passed a highly unpopular bill to cap the carbon emissions that cause climate change, only to see it go nowhere in the Senate, bringing down some House Democrats in the process.