Moderate House Republicans Caved Again: Matthew Yglesias

Republican moderates in the House caved. Again.

The Republican-controlled House passed President Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” last week by a single vote, and with support from frontline GOP moderates in districts that Trump lost in 2024. But to truly understand the depths of their capitulation — and why it’s likely to happen again — it’s necessary to go back three years, to the 2022 passage of the Inflation Reduction Act.

The architects of that law’s clean energy provisions hoped to make them politically sustainable by ensuring that investment would flow to red areas of the country as well as ...