After months of bitter stalemate over the debt ceiling, Republican negotiators, who are using the risk of economic calamity to extract spending cuts from Democrats, unveiled the contours of a deal with the White House Thursday. Negotiations had seemingly been moving closer to an agreement all week. In brief remarks, President Joe Biden said he and Speaker Kevin McCarthy had “several productive conversations” but differed on who should bear the brunt of these budget negotiations Thursday afternoon: “I don’t believe the whole burden should fall on the backs of middle-class and working-class Americans,” Biden said from the Rose Garden. “My House Republican friends disagree.”
But back on the Hill, a growing sense of restlessness and frustration has settled in among Democrats, who even just a day before the outline of a deal came out, said McCarthy was negotiating in bad faith, and that Biden was falling prey to Republican messaging. “After initially saying that we cannot negotiate under threat of default, somehow we ended up in negotiations under threat of default,” California Democrat Jared Huffman told Vanity Fair, referring to early comments from the White House that Biden would not engage in Republicans’ game of brinkmanship. “I’m not interested in blame casting or recriminations, but this is a moment where we have just got to be clear-eyed about what’s really going on … McCarthy and the House Republican majority that has given him his marching orders are simply not honest brokers.”
In recent days, Democrats have become more vocal about their internal discontentment, specifically about the White House’s messaging strategy—or, lack thereof— throughout this ordeal. One Democratic lawmaker told CNN that the messaging strategy was an “atrocity” and asked, “Where’s the president? Is he in an undisclosed location?” The silence from the White House, some Democrats contend, has created a communications vacuum that McCarthy has readily filled. “Speaker McCarthy has been out there misleading the American people with his rhetoric and he has been successful at painting the Republican Party as a party that is more responsible when it comes to fiscal spending and governing. But the exact opposite is the truth,” New York Democrat Jamaal Bowman told Vanity Fair, noting that the Republican Party voted to raise the debt ceiling three times during the Donald Trump presidency. “They are pushing back against raising a debt ceiling without spending cuts simply because it’s a Democratic president.”
Democrats are pushing for Biden to use his bully pulpit more vigorously. “We’re not framing it at all. So, we’re just ceding the space. It’s insane. I’ve never seen anything like this. We have the Oval Office, and it’s like we might as well be in, like, Walmart,” another Democrat also told CNN.
According to The New York Times, White House and McCarthy’s negotiators have settled broadly on a two-year debt ceiling increase that would prevent the nation from defaulting, paired with two years of budget cap that would amount to some nondefense spending cuts. The details are still under works: “Nothing’s resolved,” North Carolina representative Patrick T. McHenry, one of Republicans lead negotiators, told the Times. With the far-right faction of the House Republican conference adamant that it won’t make any concessions to Biden (Florida’s right-wing lawmaker Matt Gaetz told Semafor this week that many of his colleagues, “don’t feel like we should negotiate with our hostage”), it’s also unclear how McCarthy will navigate the actual vote. Progressives are quick to point out that McCarthy agreed to a House rule that allows any lawmaker to bring up a vote for his ouster. “We got to this moment because McCarthy had to beg and plead to become speaker,” Congresswoman Ilhan Omar said. But with a Democratic Senate, any actual increase to the debt ceiling will have to be bipartisan.
House Democrats made it known to reporters that their votes were not a given. “The scale of the cuts is staggering, which really the public knows very little about,” Representative Rosa DeLauro said, according to Politico. Asked by reporters if it was a mistake to assume that House Democrats would help pass a deal reached by McCarthy and the White House, Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries bluntly responded, “Yes.”
“It’s a miscalculation to assume that simply any agreement that House Republicans are able to reach will, by definition, trigger a sufficient number of Democratic votes—if that agreement undermines our values,” Jeffries said.
Abigail Tracy
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