White House officials have spent weeks engaged in skirmishes with House Republicans over the looming debt ceiling battle.
Those skirmishes have now expanded into an all-out war.
President Joe Biden’s economic speech in Maryland on Wednesday, which leveled a series of policy and political attacks at House Republicans, serves as a critical marker for a White House moving quickly to escalate the political pressure on House Republicans as the calendar moves closer to the deadline to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.
Months of messaging and rapid response efforts to counter nascent House GOP debt limit proposals evolved this week into a full-scale effort to undercut Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s spending cut and debt ceiling proposal at the moment of its inception.
Biden’s remarks, though planned for several weeks, provided a window into the trigger for the escalation.
“Just two days ago the speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy went to Wall Street to describe the MAGA economic vision for American,” Biden said in reference to McCarthy’s speech Monday at the New York Stock Exchange.
McCarthy’s high-profile remarks, which broadly outlined the Republican push for steep spending cuts in exchange for a debt ceiling increase, set in motion the House Republican push to pass a proposal and shift the entrenched political dynamics.
“American debt is a ticking time bomb that will detonate unless we take serious, responsible action,” McCarthy said in his New York speech, which previewed a proposal that was made public Wednesday.
Biden’s remarks, at a union hall in Maryland, served as a clear response.
“Massive cuts in programs you count on,” Biden said of the outlines of McCarthy’s proposal. “The threat of defaulting on America’s debt for the first time in 230 years.”
The…
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