Joe Biden Kevin McCarthy meeting yields no debt ceiling deal

WASHINGTON—House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said he had a “very good discussion” with President Joe Biden at the White House on Wednesday about the looming debt ceiling and federal spending.

“We have different points of view. But we both presented some of the visions of where we wanted to get to. I believe we can see,” McCarthy told reporters at the White House after the meeting.

The Democratic president and the California Republican spoke for over an hour, and although there was “no agreement” or “no promise,” McCarthy said the conversation would continue. The two said they had “candid and candid dialogue” as part of their ongoing conversation.

The Biden administration has repeated the familiar phrase that the president is “eager to continue working across the aisle in good faith”, but emphasized that he has no intention of negotiating the removal of the debt ceiling.

“It is their common duty not to allow an unprecedented and economically devastating default,” the White House statement said. “The U.S. Constitution is clear about this mandate, and the American people expect Congress to meet it like all of its predecessors. It is neither negotiable nor conditional.”

The Speaker of the House later said the talks went better than expected. McCarthy added that he believes investors will feel better about the prospect of a deal to avoid the first-ever default on U.S. Treasuries.

“Based on today’s meeting, I would feel better if I were the market,” he said, according to Punchbowl News.

The Treasury Department has launched a series of unusual measures to keep government bills paid, and we expect these measures to be enough to avoid default until at least early June. But if Congress doesn’t raise or suspend the debt ceiling by then, it could wreak havoc around the world.

McCarthy has taken the position that both parties must agree to cut spending before the debt ceiling can be raised. The White House said the president agrees that addressing the national debt is a priority, but that should be a separate conversation.

“The president welcomes individual discussions with congressional leaders on how to reduce the deficit and manage the national debt while continuing to grow the economy. It must be based on the leadership of a president who has achieved a trillion-dollar deficit reduction in office,” the administration statement said.

But for House Republicans, it’s no starter. They believe the vote to increase the government’s borrowing power and their demands for cuts in government spending go hand in hand.

“If you have children and you give them a credit card and they use it up to the limit, you are responsible for paying the credit card. how they are spending,” McCarthy said.

The comparison has become a familiar opinion of the Speaker of the House in the sense that House Republicans do not intend to allow the United States to default on its debts, but insist on changing the amount of money the government spends.

But what these changes will be remains a mystery and has been the subject of controversy in the House Republican Caucus.

Asked by White House reporters what kind of spending cuts he was seeking, McCarthy replied, “I’m not going to negotiate this in the press.”

Over the next few months, McCarthy’s job will be to build consensus among the party caucus about what spending cuts should be pushed during debt ceiling negotiations.

This task is further complicated by the fact that not everyone in the Republican caucus shares his belief that the government should raise the debt ceiling.

Several fiscal hardliner Members of the House of Representatives have already made it clear that they are willing to force a default on the national debt if the bill doesn’t come with significant spending cuts in return for passage.

The problem with these requests is that the House-approved debt ceiling bill must get 60 votes to pass the Democratic-controlled Senate before the president can sign the bill into law.

The Senate is unlikely to pass the drastic spending cuts that some far-right Republicans are seeking.

Chuck Schumer, Democratic Senate Majority Leader in New York, reminded the House Speaker of his challenge on Wednesday.

Mr. Schumer said on the Senate floor, “For days, Speaker of the House McCarthy has been touting this roundtable as some kind of big victory in his debt ceiling negotiations.” You can’t pretend to be there.”

McCarthy’s task of pulling together a ramshackle caucus into a plan would be difficult under any circumstances. But it’s all the more difficult because his majority in the House is so thin.

If the Speaker of the House tried to pass the House debt ceiling bill with just the Republican vote, he could afford to lose four members of the caucus and still reach a majority of the 218 votes needed to pass the bill. I could afford it.

He could also try to craft a debt ceiling bill that would pass with votes from more moderate Republicans and a majority of Democrats.

Betting on members of the opposing party to bail him out is risky.

But for both Democrats and Republicans, the worst-case scenario remains an unprecedented U.S. government debt default that could bring routine operations within the federal government to a halt and quickly ripple through stock markets and the economy at large. .

A Moody’s Analytics report last year found that a default on U.S. Treasurys could plunge the U.S. economy into a state as severe as the Great Recession. Moody’s predicts that if the US defaults on its debt, gross domestic product will fall by 4% and 6 million workers will lose their jobs.