In a letter, Nancy Pelosi argued that “Republicans’ desperate thirst for lifting the oil export ban empowered Democrats to win significant concessions.” Photograph by Yuri Gripas / Reuters / Landov

Today, the House and Senate passed a $1.1 trillion omnibus spending bill that averts a government shutdown and funds the government for the next year. The vote in the Senate was never in doubt, but in the House, where year-end spending bills have long been a source of tension, there was some last-minute drama over whether Democrats would provide enough votes to secure the bill’s passage. In the end, an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans supported it.

The most significant policy change in the legislation is an end to the forty-year ban on American crude-oil exports, which Democrats agreed to in return for an extension of solar- and wind-energy-industry tax credits. The extension of the tax credits is an enormous victory for Democrats, perhaps the most significant green-energy achievement of the Obama era. Bloomberg Business, citing one industry analyst, says, “the deal will speed up the shift from fossil fuels more than the global climate deal struck this month in Paris and more than Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan that regulates coal plants.” As for the end of the ban on crude-oil exports, in a letter to colleagues yesterday the House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi argued that “the wind and solar tax credits in the omnibus will eliminate around ten times more carbon pollution than the exports of oil will add.”

Recall that, only a few weeks ago, House conservatives were trying to use this omnibus bill to kill federal funding for Planned Parenthood, halt Obama’s plan to resettle Syrian refugees in the United States, attack numerous Obama environmental policies, and generate a wish list of some hundred and fifty policy riders. (Here’s a good rundown of them.) Pelosi, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid, and the White House got all of the riders struck from the bill, and won the wind and solar tax credits in exchange for conceding to the oil industry’s top priority, the export ban. “This was [House Speaker Paul] Ryan’s first big test and he got a failing grade,” Raúl Labrador, a founder of the conservative House Freedom Caucus, told me via text message. “Not a good start.”

How did this happen? Two underlying dynamics were at play. First, because many of the most conservative Republicans would not support the spending bill under almost any circumstances, Ryan had to depend on Democrats to reach the two hundred and eighteen votes necessary to pass the legislation. That put Pelosi in a powerful negotiating position, and is the most recent example of how the House Freedom Caucus, by withholding support for Republican leadership’s priorities, has helped to shift legislation to the left. As the former Freedom Caucus member Tom McClintock argued when he resigned from the group, in September, the Freedom Caucus has “unwittingly become Nancy Pelosi’s tactical ally.”

The second political dynamic at play was that, despite all of the recent attention paid to issues of stopping Planned Parenthood and blocking refugees, the constituencies for these policies proved to be incredibly weak compared to the G.O.P.’s business wing, especially the American Petroleum Institute, which launched a fierce lobbying campaign to win the right to export American crude. “Today, the American people can cheer the House and now the Senate for putting the nation’s energy needs ahead of politics,” the American Petroleum Institute president Jack Gerard wrote in a statement when the bill passed.

As Pelosi argued in her letter, “Republicans’ desperate thirst for lifting the oil export ban empowered Democrats to win significant concessions.” While there were also prominent Democrats who supported lifting the ban, Pelosi was right to assume that the oil industry had more leverage over Paul Ryan and the Republican leadership than any of the constituencies championed by the House Freedom Caucus. Similarly, the pressure on the Democrats from the green-energy industry won out over many other groups that pushed for liberal priorities. So the political lesson of the omnibus is an old one: in Washington, big business almost always beats out everyone else.