Biden’s debt limit beef with McCarthy is less about default than who is at fault
W. James Antle III
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When President Joe Biden began holding debt ceiling talks at the White House, he insisted that he was the one taking default off the table.
Democratic congressional leaders went a step further, asserting that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) did not.
BIDEN’S DEBT GAMES ARE ALL PLAYED OUT
“We explicitly asked Speaker McCarthy, ‘Would he take default off the table?’ He refused,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) told reporters. “Instead of him giving us a plan to remove default he gave us a plan to take default hostage. And that is a shame, because it makes things more complicated.”
The problem with this is the only person who up to that point had passed a debt ceiling extension through a chamber of Congress was McCarthy, whose package pairing a debt limit hike with spending cuts cleared the House.
Schumer has not at this writing passed a debt ceiling extension through the Senate. After weeks of contending McCarthy did not have the votes for a GOP plan, it is not clear the Senate Democratic leader has the votes to raise the debt ceiling unaccompanied by spending cuts.
If so, Biden’s opening gambit does not appear to have the votes in either house of Congress. If he does not alter his position, as Democrats fear he may belatedly be doing in the new phase of negotiations, the country risks default.
A new ad by a conservative group makes this point.
“Republicans did their job passing reasonable spending cuts and raising the debt ceiling,” says a voiceover in the spot “Biden is ignoring this commonsense plan, demanding he gets everything he wants or else he’ll cripple the economy. It’s extreme and there’s only Biden to blame. It’s time the president compromises to get our fiscal house in order.”
This is the charge the White House has made against McCarthy’s plan.
“Imagine if this president said, ‘Here’s my budget’ on March 9. ‘If you don’t take it all — lock, stock, and barrel, don’t change your word, pass it without changes, I’d be willing to cause a recession and cost millions of people their jobs.’ That would be extreme,”budget director Shalanda Young told reporters.
But Biden was at that time no less willing to risk default over his fiscal priorities and agenda than were McCarthy and the House Republicans. And whatever the merits of the president’s argument that the debt ceiling has been raised without conditions in the past, he remained unwilling to align his goals with what could pass Congress now.
Biden and Republicans disagree on spending, though the White House maintained it was willing to negotiate on these issues separate from the debt ceiling. But much of the Biden administration’s messaging has concerned who is to blame for default.
McCarthy, citing the $1.5 trillion increase in the debt limit in the House-passed bill, sees the matter differently. “Apparently, President Biden doesn’t want a deal, he wants a default,” he told reporters after one White House meeting.
“The clock is ticking, and this default will be squarely on the President’s shoulders given his unwillingness to compromise,” said American Action Newtork president Dan Conston. “The House has passed commonsense spending reforms that responsibly prevent default and start getting our fiscal house in order. We are out of time for political games.”
Biden’s former boss engaged in a version of this debate during the Iraq War.
In the heat of the 2008 presidential campaign, GOP nominee Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) accused his Democratic opponent Barack Obama of voting against funding the troops in Iraq. That’s now how Obama saw it.
“Senator McCain opposed funding for troops in legislation that had a timetable, because he didn’t believe in a timetable,” Obama said in their first presidential debate. “I opposed funding a mission that had no timetable, and was open-ended, giving a blank check to George Bush. We had a difference on the timetable. We didn’t have a difference on whether or not we were going to be funding troops.”
By this logic, Biden and McCarthy have a difference on spending levels and which programs to cut. They may have a difference on how long a debt ceiling extension should be or when the limit might be hit again in relation to the 2024 elections. But they do not have a difference on whether to extend the debt ceiling.
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If they are unable to come up with a deal in time to avoid default, they will have another difference.
Biden and McCarthy will disagree about who is at fault.