President Biden is set to meet with Speaker Kevin McCarthy and other congressional leaders at the White House today, and Biden is expected to reiterate that he wants the debt ceiling — which is expected to be breached as early as June 1 — raised without any preconditions. He will not, he’s said all year, negotiate over this matter.
That position may be increasingly untenable.
So far, this showdown has not played out how the president may have hoped.
Think back to the chaos of January 2023, when McCarthy spent days trying to line up the votes to become speaker in a closely divided House. The debt limit was obviously looming, and it seemed that the House GOP, hopelessly divided between extremists and their few moderates, could well fail to agree on any plan, and McCarthy would not be able to whip them into line.
One possibility then was that when the deadline drew nearer, outside business groups and public opinion would pressure Republicans to act — and eventually, to avoid economic calamity, moderate Republicans would break from the hardliners in their party and vote to raise the debt ceiling (perhaps using an unusual procedural tactic, the discharge petition, to force a House vote).
The problem for Biden is that this isn’t what’s happened.
Instead, the House GOP united around one plan that they passed through the House — a plan Democrats find absurdly extreme, but that could nonetheless be interpreted as an opening bid for talks. That’s exactly how House Republicans have framed it. “Had the president agreed to negotiate in good faith, we’d already be done,” McCarthy said last month.
Meanwhile, moderates and business groups are exerting pressure on Biden to talk with McCarthy. In both the House and the Senate, GOP moderates are in lockstep urging Biden to engage, and Democratic moderates like Rep. Jared Golden (ME) and Sen. Joe Manchin (WV) are singing the same tune.
The result is that it’s Biden who looks increasingly out on a limb….
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