‘NO PROGRESS’: McCarthy casts doubt debt ceiling agreement will materialize
Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Monday morning that “no progress” had been made overnight in the debt ceiling negotiations, with only hours left before he sits down with President Biden.
“I don’t see any progress,” he told reporters of the staff-level talks that took place over the weekend. “And it really worries me about the timeline of where we are.”
The Treasury Department reiterated on Monday that they still believe the day the nation runs out of money to pay its bills could be as early as June 1.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise expressed a similar level of pessimism: “I’m not even sure their negotiations will go through.”
Biden and the “Big Four,” McCarthy, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell meet at the White House Tuesday at 3 p.m.
The four met for the first time last Tuesday. They were originally supposed to meet again on Friday, but those talks were canceled, according to McCarthy, because not enough progress had been made with staff throughout the week.
And just 16 days before June 1, Biden and McCarthy disagree on how they think debt ceiling negotiations are progressing.
“I really think there’s a desire on both their part and ours to get to an agreement, and I think we’re going to be able to do that,” an optimistic Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday.
“I stay optimistic because I’m an innate optimist.”
Biden declined to provide details on the status of the talks. “I learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do, it’s never good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation,” he said.
McCarthy characterized the talks as “still far apart.”
“It doesn’t seem like they want a deal yet, it just seems like they want to look like they’re in a meeting, but they’re not talking anything serious,” he told reporters Monday morning.
“I really think there’s a desire on both their part and ours to come to an agreement, and I think we’re going to be able to do that,” an optimistic Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday.
“It doesn’t seem to me that they want a deal yet, it just seems like they want to look like they’re in a meeting, but they’re not talking about anything serious,” McCarthy told reporters Monday morning.
“It looks like they would rather have a default than a deal,” the speaker said, adding that they need a deal before “this weekend” to have “a timeline to pass it in both houses.”
In a surprising development over the weekend, Biden showed openness to stricter job requirements for welfare programs, a top priority in the House GOP’s debt limit bill.
Biden said he had voted for the “tougher job requirements” in the past as a senator, but “it’s a different story for Medicaid, so I’ll wait and see what their proposal is exactly.”
The House Republicans’ debt limit bill, the Limit, Save Grow Act, included stricter work requirements for Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF.
Biden also appeared open to recovering unused Covid-19 funds, estimated to be between $50 billion and $70 billion. He is reportedly open to discretionary nonsense for the rest of his tenure.
In return, Biden is demanding that Republicans stop trying to reverse his key legislative achievements, which include easing student debt, limiting the spending cap to two years, and raising the debt ceiling at least through the elections of 2024.
Biden’s openness to job requirements enraged progressives.
“We didn’t choose Joe Biden from 1986,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., President of the Progressive Caucus, to Politico. “We chose Joe Biden of 2020.”
She called adding new job requirements for SNAP an “absolutely terrible idea” and “a nonstarter for many of us in the Democratic caucus.”
Biden also said he planned to attend the G-7 in Japan later this week — a trip he previously said he could participate virtually if debt limit talks force him to stay in Washington.
McCarthy said the president “didn’t take it seriously,” but stopped criticizing him for leaving the country during the negotiations.
The federal government reached its limit of $31.4 trillion in January, prompting the Treasury to take “extraordinary measures” to move money around and buy more time for Congress to work out a deal.
The Treasury now says the country may run out of money to pay its bills by June 1, though the exact date is unknown.
Biden has long pushed for Congress to present him with a “clean” debt ceiling bill and talk about spending cuts after the cap is raised. McCarthy has long maintained that he will not – use the debt ceiling as leverage to demand cuts to the federal budget.
The president, meanwhile, spent the weekend at his home in Rehoboth and will spend Monday attending his granddaughter Maisy’s graduation from the University of Pennsylvania.