Nothing Republicans have done in recent years provided more direct benefits to Americans than their increasing of the child tax credit in 2017. The tax credit was introduced into American law and subsequently expanded twice by Republican Congresses. There was a detour under President Biden, when Democrats temporarily expanded it in a way that ended its work requirement for households receiving it. Still, it is largely a Republican achievement.

But Republicans have not talked about it as such because some conservatives — few in number but influential — have never liked it. When inflation largely undid the expansion of 2017, Republicans didn’t add it to their indictment of the Biden administration. The House Ways and Means Committee’s first stab at a tax bill last summer ignored the issue. After a lot of criticism, the committee took a second pass that included an expansion of the child credit during the next two years — but everyone involved in the negotiations treated that expansion as a sop to Democrats in return for the Republican priority of extending business tax cuts.

As a result, the form of that expansion catered to Democratic rather than Republican priorities. The expansion then drew a lot of conservative attacks both from people who never liked the credit and from people who disagreed with the details of this expansion. The details people had some reasonable concerns. The child credit as currently structured encourages paid work in low-income households, and some provisions of the Ways and Means bill could reduce that incentive for some of those households. My own read of the debate is that this effect would probably be small, and offset by the way that some provisions would increase work incentives.

As debate over the bill has proceeded, though, other criticisms have become more prominent.

One concerns illegal immigrants with children who are U.S. citizens. They are eligible for the credit and would therefore share in the benefits from an expansion. That seems to me to be a better argument for serious enforcement of the immigration laws — e-verify, anyone? — than for rejecting the bill.

Another criticism is that letting people who don’t owe any income taxes claim the credit amounts to “welfare” and should be opposed on that basis. This argument typically comes attached to the claim that the expansion is a step toward a “universal basic income” that gives money to all households, no strings attached.

This thinking is both mistaken and a dead end for conservatives — which is one reason to be glad, as I wrote in the Washington Post, that the House last night voted by large margins for the bill. The slippery-slope argument, for example, gets the politics backward:

The child credit, under this bill, would continue to go only to households with kids where at least one parent has recently been employed. The weak spot of a universal basic income is that it would have the government give money to people who are neither employed nor raising kids. If we had a large child credit linked to work, the case for a UBI for everyone else would rest on its least-sympathetic recipients.

Assuming Congress enacts this bill (it awaits Senate action), it will have another opportunity to revisit the issue when its provisions expire in 2025. Republicans could use that opportunity to expand the credit for middle-class families — at least restoring it to the value it had in 2018, before the high inflation of the last few years — and, with the benefit of additional evidence about the effects of this bill, address any negative effects on work. But getting a good deal will require both that Republicans win elections and that they view the child credit as a conservative opportunity rather than a distasteful political necessity.