House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Monday in Jerusalem that he still has not heard from President Joe Biden about debt ceiling talks, following the House passing a GOP-led bill in an effort to pressure the White House to the negotiating table.
“The president still hasn’t talked to me. I’m a little bit like Netanyahu,” he said, referring to Biden not having invited Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a visit since he came back into power in December.
“I’m concerned about the debt ceiling. I have been from the moment I became speaker. That’s why on February 1, I went to see the president and said we should sit down and solve this problem,” he told CNN’s Hadas Gold.
“The debt is a big challenge for America. We’re going to have to come together to solve it. We’ve been through this before. The only way you solve problems is you negotiate, and I’m looking forward to the president changing his mind and negotiating with us. If that’s not the case, I wanted to make sure that the debt ceiling did get raised and so we raised it before we came here.”
The White House has said the debt limit should be raised without any conditions, while Republicans are insisting any increase in the limit must be paired with spending cuts.
McCarthy received some push back from a fellow House member when former House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer took to the microphone to remind McCarthy what he said a few weeks ago in a speech on Wall street.
“I think it’s important to say, the Speaker spoke on Wall Street. He said that defaulting on our debt is not an option. I think we have universal, almost universal, agreement on that proposition. I believe America will not default on its debt,” Hoyer said, prompting a terse response from the speaker.
“We will not pass the debt ceiling that just raises it without doing…
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