(Bloomberg Opinion) — 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 blue ones. Republican elected officials might not care about climate change, they reasoned, but surely they would think twice about killing tax credits that helped fund projects and create jobs in their districts.
And they were right — to a point. In March, 21 House Republicans signed an open letter calling for the retention of the clean energy tax credits. Since the GOP majority in the House is much smaller than that, it should have been an easy win — the BBB might trim or limit the credits, but they would survive in some form.
Except they didn’t. The initial draft of the law phased them out, which is slightly better than outright elimination and at least gave moderate members a fig leaf to vote for the bill. They could say that they would work on a separate track to get them extended or made permanent on a bipartisan basis. But right-wing members of the caucus were hip to that and threatened to revolt unless the phaseout was sped up.
Critically, the right-wing members were credible. Speaker Mike Johnson believed they might really sink the bill, so he changed it to appease their concerns. The moderates were not credible. Johnson called their bluff once and they folded, then he called it again — and they folded again.
That’s bad news for the US technology industry and US ratepayers. But it also could be a preview of the next few months in Washington, because this legislation still needs to pass the Senate.
Politically, the toughest thing in the BBB is that it will slash hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicaid spending, costing millions of Americans their health insurance. There’s no other way to make the math work. But once you’ve decided to cut hundreds of billions from Medicaid and cost millions of Americans their health insurance, there are lots of ways to do it.
One idea early on was to change the Federal Medical Assistance Percentage (FMAP) formula in a way that would be unfavorable to high-income states. The way Medicaid works is that states set coverage rules and split the tab with the federal government. The split is determined by the FMAP, which is basically a function of the wealth of a state; the poorer it is, the more generous the FMAP. The lowest allowable FMAP is 50%, though strictly speaking the formula says that high-income states such as Washington and New York should get less. During the transition, House leaders proposed doing just that.
Once they started putting together the bill, however, this idea disappeared — partly because, if you are a Republican representative in one of these states, FMAP cuts are a crude and harsh measure. Instead, the House opted for a complicated series of logistical and administrative hurdles that they can characterize as anti-fraud provisions or efforts to encourage work.
In practice, these are just cuts that will save money by kicking people off Medicaid. But they have the benefit, at least from a Republican representative’s standpoint, of being complicated and obscure compared to the blunt-force trauma of an FMAP change.
But now the bill is moving to the Senate — and none of the states that would lose out from changes to FMAP have any Republican senators. If you represent, say, West Virginia or Louisiana, the idea of a Medicaid cut that doesn’t hurt your constituents looks pretty tempting. You could add this FMAP provision to reduce the deficit impact of the bill, or to make the tax cuts even deeper, or to reduce some of the other Medicaid cuts. From the perspective of a Republican senator, it’s a no-brainer.
Not so for a Republican representative in the House. Not only are there plenty of Republicans from states that would lose out, but a large share of them are also the caucus’ most vulnerable frontliners. Theoretically, protecting them and their interests should be a top priority for the party’s leadership.
In practice, though, Republican leaders have learned time and again over the years that House moderates always fold. In the past Senate Republican moderates — notably Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski — have bucked the party line on key votes and even killed major pieces of legislation. But there are no comparable examples of House moderates sticking to their guns in recent years. Sure, they got an increase in the SALT deduction in this bill, but it is far less than what they asked for initially.
In contrast, the far-right of the caucus has shown itself willing to blow up practically anything — from the first TARP vote in 2008 to the speakerships of John Boehner and Kevin McCarthy. Leaders have learned their lesson, and when it came to the energy tax credits, they steamrolled over moderates’ objections without losing their votes. Even now, some of those moderates are saying that they merely acted to advance the bill and are hoping it gets changed in the Senate.
The irony is that they’re right: It almost certainly will be changed. But unless moderate House Republicans suddenly grow a backbone, or get a transplant, the changes won’t be in their favor.
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This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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.”
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