As congressional Republicans move forward with their debt ceiling scheme, the White House has repeatedly emphasized a simple point: President Joe Biden has no intention of negotiating with those threatening Americans with deliberate harm. The Democrat did agree last week, however, to meet with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy to, as the White House put it, “discuss a range of issues, as part of a series of meetings with all new Congressional leaders to start the year.”
The California Republican saw the invitation itself as a win — as if the president’s willingness to have a conversation with the speaker as the new Congress gets underway represents proof that debt ceiling negotiations are actually happening. Biden and his team had a very different perspective.
In other words, as McCarthy heads to the West Wing today for a meeting, he and the president don’t even agree on why they’re having a conversation.
Yesterday, as NBC News reported, the mess got messier.
Ahead of President Joe Biden’s first meeting Wednesday with new House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, the White House issued two sternly worded demands to the speaker. In a memo circulated Tuesday, top White House advisers Brian Deese and Shalanda Young said Biden intends to ask McCarthy, R-Calif., to “commit to the bedrock principle that the United States will never default” and to lay out his specific plan to reduce the deficit if he wants to attach it to an extension of the debt ceiling.
The White House’s memo was a rather serious, 1,000-word document, which included sections on specific budget figures. It also tried to establish some parameters ahead of today’s meeting: Biden wants McCarthy to vow at the outset not to cause a deliberate economic catastrophe — hardly an unreasonable request for an elected official who’s supposed to work on behalf of the public — and to present some kind of plan that reflects his and his party’s stated goals.
Those hoping McCarthy would follow up with an equally…
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