The National Review editor Rich Lowry defended the backlash against the infrastructure supporters by citing his magazine’s long-standing opposition to infrastructure spending. “It’s not tribalism to oppose what we’ve always opposed,” he wrote. Lowry is right: National Review criticized Trump’s spending plans too.

What is missing here is not consistency but proportion. Fiscal conservatives have every reason to be angry about spending, but one would hope to see the same sort of anger directed at President Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, his fomenting of an insurrection on January 6, and the members of Congress who abetted him. There’s no use in arguing over the finer points of budgeting if you don’t have rule of law and a functional democracy to begin with.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, some of the members who have been noisiest about the BIF vote are those like Greene, Cawthorn, and Gaetz, who most staunchly stood by Trump. For Greene, anyone who votes against the House Republican Party’s voting preference is a “traitor,” whereas people who literally attempted to subvert the constitutional process are “patriots” and “political prisoners.” (Trump allies have not failed to notice that four of the 13 Republicans who voted for the BIF are also among the 10 who voted to impeach Trump in January.) Some of National Review’s writers have condemned January 6, but they seem more interested in litigating whether it should properly be called an insurrection. The answer is yes, but this deflection into semantic chin-stroking mostly illustrates how the magazine continues to struggle to reconcile its historical commitments with the former president’s domination of the GOP.