Matthew Yglesias, Columnist

Moderate House Republicans Did What They Do Best: They Caved

And the Senate is likely to make the House’s “Big Beautiful Bill” even less palatable to their center-right colleagues in the lower chamber.

May 25, 2025 at 12:00 PM UTC

By Matthew Yglesias

Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author of “One Billion Americans.”

Moderate Republicans aren’t necessarily smiling.
Photographer: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images North America

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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.