Tag: congressional leaders

NCAA leaders warn college sports at risk of ‘permanent damage’ without action from Congress

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The NCAA’s most powerful conferences delivered an urgent plea to congressional leaders last week: We need your help to save college sports – and need it now.

The commissioners of the Big Ten, Big 12, Atlantic Coast Conference and Southeastern Conference quietly lobbied leaders in both parties – including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries – to back legislation that would set national standards on how collegiate athletes can profit on their name, image and likeness.

Their warning: That a Supreme Court decision two years ago that paved the way for companies to pay student athletes has led to a complicated series of state laws that have undermined collegiate sports and could ultimately lead to the collapse of sports programs across the United States.

“The risk is permanent damage to an enterprise that has meant an awful lot to our country, and to those that have benefited from the experiences,” James Phillips, the ACC commissioner, said on “Inside Politics Sunday.”

Greg Sankey, the SEC commissioner, had a dire prediction if Congress doesn’t act.

“The risk is we see states further build walls around their recruiting grounds, thinking that that somehow provides a competitive advantage,” Sankey said. “The risk is that more and more young people sign agreements that they don’t understand. The risk is we move further and further from the academic nature of college sports.”

In their first-ever joint interview, the four power conference leaders told CNN that the current landscape has created grave instability where collegiate athletes increasingly transfer to different universities based on different states’ rules on profiting off their name, image and likeness, or NIL. Athletes’ increasing use of the transfer portal, they said, has become problematic in college sports, particularly for student athletes’ quest to get a college degree.

And, they say, college boosters have taken advantage of the current patchwork of laws to help their universities recruit the top athletes by promising big paydays – to the detriment of colleges in other states that are forced to play by a different set of rules.

They say it’s time to set a national standard to even the playing field.

“You’ve got a system where it becomes very transactional, in terms of how student athletes are moving and you see it on the field,” said Big Ten Commissioner Tony Petitti. “You’ll see tremendous player movement, but there’s also another side of it, which is a lot of student athletes just don’t end up some place. And that’s a problem. Because the grass isn’t always greener, there isn’t always a deal that comes through.”

Petitti added that programs “can rise and fall very quickly” with players choosing to transfer, while the ACC’s Phillips said “multiple movements shown in the course of the student athlete’s career that they’re less likely to graduate.”

Multiple proposals have been put forward by lawmakers for a federal NIL law, though getting floor time for a bill, much less enacting one into law, will be an arduous task. There’s new focus on an effort by Sens. Ted Cruz, a Republican of Texas, and Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat, to try to strike a bipartisan accord on a proposal. The four commissioners met with the two senators last week.

“I’m confident that there’s a bipartisan path and the urgency to get something done is there,” Booker, a former college football player, told CNN. “I think everybody who has a football or basketball player in their state is interested in getting it done.”

Among the hurdles facing the leaders: GOP resistance to enacting federal legislation as Republicans often advocate for states’ rights.

Asked if there has been any resistance to the push for a national standard, Sankey, the SEC commissioner, said, “Sure. Questions about that – like, why, why is this necessary? Now our federal government does have a role in interstate commerce, that’s the reality. There’s interstate activity, this is a national activity.”

NIL deals stem from an NCAA policy change in 2021 that allowed student athletes to profit from sponsorship opportunities – a move that came after the Supreme Court said that student athletes could receive education-related payments in a case that reshaped the landscape of college sports.

Student athletes have taken advantage – with well-known names in college sports like basketball player Caitlin Clark and football player Caleb Williams appearing in commercials for major national brands such as State Farm and Wendy’s.

Supporters of a national standard say its implementation would help safeguard student athletes by setting up critical guardrails as they sign on for potentially lucrative opportunities.

“We need protection for our student athletes. You know, some of the situations that they find themselves in, trusting advisors that steer them in the wrong direction end up being really counterproductive and harmful,” Phillips said.

ACC commissioner James Phillips speaks to the media during ACC Media Days at The Westin Charlotte. – Jim Dedmon/USA Today Network

In some cases, he said, “agents end up taking more of the income than goes to the student athlete or to their families.”

Brett Yormark, commissioner of the Big 12, said that it’s difficult for student athletes to navigate the different rules in different states.

“We think it’s positive for student athletes to be able to leverage their name, image and likeness in all the right ways. But we need some guardrails around it,” Yormark said.

In the absence of federal legislation, a number of states have enacted their own laws, creating a legal patchwork around the country.

“It’s created a disparity among states, where legislators are now changing their laws for competitive purposes. It certainly has created economic opportunity for younger people, but it has introduced an unregulated marketplace,” Sankey said.

“What we’re constantly hearing, from young people, from those on our campus involved in recruiting, is the current environment doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Asked whether McConnell and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer expressed interest in a national standard, Sankey said that “both, very much interest, and in fact, both reflected on each other and the importance of having conversations on both sides of the aisle.”

There is bipartisan support in Congress for a law to set a national NIL standard, but some Republicans have warned that any new law must be crafted with minimal government intervention and without setting up new federal agencies to make or enforce rules, a potential sticking point in any negotiation.

Cruz told CNN he thinks “the prospects of passing NIL legislation are about 60/40,” and feels “cautiously optimistic.”

“I think we are risking doing enormous damage to college athletics if Congress does not step in and act. It is the wild west right now, and every senator, their universities in their states are telling them that this chaos makes no sense,” he said.

Cruz has put forward a draft bill to codify NIL rights. Separately, Booker released his own draft NIL bill along with GOP Sen. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

Cruz and Booker have had discussions over the two proposals and the issue of NIL as part of an ongoing effort in the Senate to find a way forward to pass bipartisan legislation.

Cruz told CNN he has had “very positive conversations” with Booker. “I think we’re making progress, but we’re not there yet,” he said.

Additionally, Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, the former head football coach at Auburn University, and Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia have introduced an NIL bill.

“There’s enough positive in all the bills, to be honest, that we can work with some combination,” Petitti said. “The effort has been, especially over the last few months, let’s try to bring people together. There’s a lot of staff putting time in it. How can we get those staff to bridge and come together to have something.”

“There’s tremendous interest from our elected officials,” Phillips said. “They understand, I think, what’s at stake. I think at the core of this, for each of us and anybody that loves college athletics, is this idea of opportunity for young people.”

CNN’s Ted Barrett and Wayne Sterling contributed.

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December 3, 2023
Why Biden Caved

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The White House and Congress have not made much progress in their talks to avert an unprecedented, and potentially calamitous, national default that could occur as soon as early June. But on the most fundamental point of dispute, President Joe Biden has already caved: He’s negotiating with Republicans over the debt ceiling.

For months, the president’s ironclad position has been that the debt ceiling is not a bargaining chip. No longer would Democrats allow Republicans to hold hostage the nation’s creditworthiness and economic prestige. Paying the government’s bills by raising the U.S.’s statutory borrowing limit would be nonnegotiable. As recently as Friday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared without equivocation, “We are not going to negotiate over the debt limit.”

But Biden himself has dropped the pretense that his weeks-long budget discussions with the GOP have not revolved around the debt ceiling. Asked specifically about the debt ceiling on Sunday—in anticipation of a second White House visit by congressional leaders, planned for today—Biden told reporters, “Well, I’ve learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do: It never is good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation.”

Read: This debt crisis is not like 2011’s. It’s worse.

So there you go: It’s a negotiation. Exactly what the two parties are discussing is only starting to become clear. According to various reports, a deal to avert default could include some changes to permitting rules that would speed up domestic-energy production; a revocation of unused COVID funds; additional work requirements for some federal programs (although the president has ruled out any modifications to Medicaid); and, most significant, a cap on overall federal spending.

The Biden administration still claims to be haggling only over the budget, not the debt ceiling. “The president has been emphasizing for months that he’s eager to have budget negotiations,” a White House official, who requested anonymity to explain the administration’s somewhat tortured position, told me. “That’s of course different from avoiding default, which is nonnegotiable.”

Biden’s no-negotiation stance was born of past experience, when in 2011 Republicans dragged out debt talks with the Obama administration to the brink of default, resulting in a downgrade of the U.S.’s credit rating. But Biden’s approach this time is proving to be neither realistic nor sustainable, especially after Speaker Kevin McCarthy defied expectations last month by getting a budget-slashing debt-ceiling bill through his narrow House majority.

Crucially, Biden failed to win strong support for his strategy from House centrists. Democrats had been hoping to persuade Republicans representing swing districts to buck McCarthy and help pass a debt-ceiling increase. But those lawmakers have stuck by the speaker. Complaining about a lack of outreach from the White House, they instead criticized Biden over his refusal—until recently—to negotiate. With Republicans unwilling to budge, Democratic centrists began to lose patience with Biden’s approach and conducted their own bipartisan negotiations.

“We believe it’s very important in general that both sides sit down and try to work this out,” Representative Josh Gottheimer of New Jersey, the Democratic co-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus, told me before Biden’s first meeting last week with McCarthy and other top congressional leaders. “This can’t become a part of a political back-and-forth as the country drives off the cliff.”

Read: “We used to be called moderate. We are not moderate.”

Last month the Problem Solvers offered their own plan, which they presented as a fallback option that could win bipartisan support should Biden and McCarthy fail to strike a deal in time. The proposal would immediately suspend the borrowing limit through the end of the year to buy time for broader budget talks. If Congress agrees to unspecified budget limits and creates a fiscal commission to tackle the nation’s long-term deficits and debt, the plan stipulates that the debt ceiling would be increased through the 2024 elections.

The compromise has yet to gain momentum, but its release seemed to undermine the Biden administration’s insistence that Democrats would not tie a debt-ceiling increase to spending reforms. “We didn’t try to fill in every blank, but we thought this was a really good framework to become the meat of the deal,” Representative Scott Peters of California, a Democrat who helped write the Problem Solvers plan, told me.

It could still prove handy. Biden struck an optimistic note on Sunday, telling reporters, “I really think there’s a desire on [Republicans’] part, as well as ours, to reach an agreement, and I think we’ll be able to do it.” But McCarthy is sounding more dour. “I still think we’re far apart,” he told NBC News yesterday morning. The speaker said that Biden “hasn’t taken it serious” and warned that an agreement needed to happen by this weekend in order for the House and Senate to have time to debate and pass it by early June.

Whether a Biden-McCarthy deal could even get through the House is also in question. Democrats have largely stayed quiet on Biden’s evident capitulation to Republicans, and the talks initially did not stir a backlash. But that may be changing as the president openly considers concessions that would be anathema to progressives, such as the possibility of adding work requirements to social safety-net programs. Still, the lack of a credible primary challenge to Biden’s reelection has helped give him room to negotiate, as Democrats fret about the effect that a default could have on the president’s already tenuous public standing.

“As long as he continues to try to avoid default, and avoid the middle class having to pay the cost for it, then he’s in the position that the majority of the electorate wants him to be,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic strategist, told me.

McCarthy has much more to worry about. He traded away his own job security to win the speakership in January, agreeing to rule changes that would make it easier for hard-right conservatives to depose him. A debt-ceiling deal that fails to secure deep enough spending cuts or policy concessions from Democrats could threaten his position. “Default can be avoided. The question is whether Kevin McCarthy could withstand putting that bill on the floor,” Ferguson said.

The speaker has secured no substantive commitments from Biden, nothing specific that he can sell to his party. But McCarthy has elicited one major concession from the president, which serves as a prerequisite for any others to come. Biden has come to the table with default in the balance, and he’s negotiating on the GOP’s terms.

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Russell Berman

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May 16, 2023
This Debt Crisis Is Not Like 2011’s. It’s Worse.

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On its surface, the unfolding debt-ceiling crisis looks a lot like the confrontation in 2011 between congressional Republicans and then-President Barack Obama. Once again, a new GOP majority in the House is using the threat of a national default as leverage to force a first-term Democratic president to agree to spending cuts in exchange for lifting the federal borrowing limit. A first-ever default could crash the markets and trigger a recession. But, as in 2011, the two parties remain far apart, with a deadline to act approaching rapidly.

Eric Cantor knows the feeling well. Twelve years ago, he was the House majority leader deputized by then-Speaker John Boehner to negotiate an agreement with Joe Biden, who was Obama’s vice president at the time. Cantor left Congress in 2014 after a stunning primary defeat that presaged the GOP’s anti-establishment, anti-immigration lurch toward Donald Trump two years later. He’s now a senior executive at a Wall Street investment bank.

I called him up this week to ask what he had learned from the 2011 negotiations and how he sees today’s fight going. He warned that the risks of failure—and with it, economic calamity—are significantly greater this time around.

Read: The logic behind Biden’s refusal to negotiate the debt ceiling

Cantor and Biden failed to strike a deal on their own in 2011; that task ultimately fell to Biden and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell. But Cantor told me he was impressed with Biden’s willingness to bargain: “He was very much in the mode of negotiating, compromising.”

Not this time—Biden has rebuffed pleas from Speaker Kevin McCarthy for one-on-one negotiations. “President Biden is not the same person as Vice President Biden was,” Cantor said, a bit ruefully. Nor has Biden empowered anyone in his administration to bargain at all.

“They’ve not negotiated a darn thing,” Cantor said.

In 2011, Obama engaged with Republicans months in advance of the fiscal deadline, and the talks between Cantor and Biden, along with separate negotiations between Obama and Boehner, helped set parameters for the agreement that materialized when the nation was on the brink of default.

The present lack of negotiations is likely a direct result of how things went back in 2011. Though both sides came to an agreement eventually, the near miss still caused a stock-market slide and the downgrading of the U.S. credit rating. When the U.S. bumped up against the debt ceiling again later in the Obama presidency, the administration was less inclined to negotiate—and a chastened GOP allowed the limit to be lifted without a fight. The lesson Democrats drew from that experience was never again to concede to the Republican premise that increasing the borrowing limit should be subject to legislative haggling.

Biden’s no-negotiation stance, however, might not be sustainable. On Monday, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen informed congressional leaders that the country would run out of fiscal wiggle room—afforded by the use of “extraordinary measures” that stretch federal funds—as soon as June 1. That deadline is earlier than many people in Washington expected, and Yellen’s warning injected fresh urgency into the effort to find a way out of the crisis. In response, Biden summoned McCarthy, McConnell, and their Democratic counterparts to a White House meeting next week.

In 2011, McCarthy was one rung beneath Cantor in the House GOP hierarchy. Now, as speaker, he’s operating with a much thinner margin than Boehner and Cantor, who had more than 20 votes to spare. The GOP’s five-vote majority has less leverage, but it is more dug-in against the Democrats, and the speakership that McCarthy fought so hard to secure could be at risk if he were to allow the debt ceiling to be raised without extracting sufficient budget cuts or other concessions. The moderate dealmakers in the House Republican Conference have all but vanished. Boehner was ultimately forced out in 2015 by a conservative revolt, but he did not face the threat of an ouster that now hangs over McCarthy.

Although McCarthy was able to muster enough votes last week to pass an opening bid through the House—“a huge victory,” Cantor told me—he’s unlikely to secure the same level of budget cuts that Republicans did in 2011. Obama and Boehner had traded proposals for entitlement cuts and tax increases, and the deal Congress eventually passed triggered $1.2 trillion in spending reductions over a 10-year period. Under pressure from former President Donald Trump, McCarthy isn’t even pushing this time for cuts to Medicare or Social Security. The likeliest solution, according to potential congressional dealmakers, is an agreement that would merely slow the growth of federal spending, not reverse it. “You’re just not going to move the needle as far,” Cantor said.

Cantor remains in touch with McCarthy; the two, along with the Republican who succeeded Boehner as speaker, Paul Ryan, were once a conservative triumvirate known as the “Young Guns” (they were already in their 40s, but this is Congress), who rose quickly in the House GOP. When I asked him whether it was possible for McCarthy to emerge victorious in the eyes of his party, Cantor seemed doubtful. “Look, he’s got a very, very slim majority,” he said. “And given where conservative media and social media is on the issue, it’s just hard to be able to create a situation where you can declare a win and have everyone go along with it.”

Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option

For now, Cantor said, McCarthy is doing what he needs to do to give himself space to negotiate. “Kevin has demonstrated a will to fight, and I think that’s the most important thing right now for members to see—he’s willing to go to bat for them and fight,” he said. “So he comes into this with a fair amount of capital to work with.”

Biden is also in fighting mode at the moment, in contrast to his bargaining mode in 2011. Cantor argued that “ironically,” Biden had more authority to hammer out a deal when he was Obama’s lieutenant than he does now. “He’s captive of the extreme left and the progressives in his party,” he said.

This is mostly spin from a Republican who remains, even in his political retirement, a party loyalist. And Biden would surely dispute the suggestion that he would cut a deal with Republicans if left to his own devices; he came away from the 2011 experience with the same determination as others in his party not to negotiate again over the debt ceiling. But Cantor’s point is that because progressives are more ascendant now than they were then, Biden has less room to maneuver, especially as he launches a reelection bid for which he’ll need the left’s enthusiastic support.

Cantor offered a couple of scenarios for how Biden and McCarthy could avert a default. The most likely involves Washington’s favorite fallback, the punt: Republicans would agree to a short-term increase in the debt ceiling in exchange for Biden committing to serious fiscal negotiations later in the year, when both sides would face a harder deadline. They could also reach a broader agreement in the next few weeks, but Cantor did not sound particularly hopeful. “I still don’t think we go into default,” the veteran of congressional brinkmanship told me, “but I think the path is certainly narrower, and the options available to either side are narrower.”

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Russell Berman

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May 4, 2023
The Obama Legacy Shaping Biden’s Most Important Decision

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President Joe Biden has already made the most important domestic-policy decision he’ll likely face this year. Biden and his top advisers have repeatedly indicated that they will reject demands from the new GOP majority in the House of Representatives to link increasing the debt ceiling with cutting federal spending. Instead, Biden is insisting that Congress pass a clean debt-ceiling increase, with no conditions attached.

Annie Lowrey: The trillion-dollar coin might be the least bad option

Biden’s refusal to negotiate with Republicans now is rooted in the Obama administration’s experiences in 2011–15 of trying to navigate increases in the debt ceiling through the same political configuration present today: a Democratic Senate and a Republican House. While Biden says he won’t negotiate a budget deal tied to a debt-ceiling increase, then-President Obama did just that in 2011. Those negotiations not only failed but proved so disruptive to financial markets, and so personally scarring, that Obama and his team emerged from the ordeal determined never to repeat it. And when House Republicans came back in 2013 asking for more concessions in exchange for raising the debt ceiling again, Obama declined to negotiate with them; eventually the GOP raised the debt ceiling without conditions.

To understand the choices Obama made about debt-ceiling negotiations, and how they are shaping Biden’s approach today, I spoke with multiple officials from the Obama era: several Cabinet secretaries, as well as top aides from the White House, executive-branch departments, and Capitol Hill. Most chose to speak without attribution to candidly discuss Obama’s deliberations. What’s clear from these conversations is that almost none of the conditions that led Obama to negotiate in 2011 are present today. This helps explain why Biden is rejecting Republican demands, but also why the risk of a cataclysmic default is even greater now than it was then.

When Congress raises the debt ceiling it does not authorize any new spending; it permits the Treasury to pay the debts the U.S. has incurred from earlier fiscal-policy decisions. A failure to raise the debt ceiling would lead to the federal government defaulting, something that has never happened, and which could crater the stock market, spike interest rates, and disrupt payments to the millions of Americans who rely on federal checks.

In some ways, Biden’s staunch refusal to link fiscal negotiations to a debt-ceiling increase is out of character for a politician who spent nearly four decades in the Senate and has prided himself on his ability to reach agreements across party lines. Even now, administration officials make clear that Biden is not precluding negotiations with House Republicans over fiscal policy. What Biden is saying is that he won’t allow Republicans to link fiscal negotiations to the threat of not raising the debt ceiling. That resolve flows directly from the Obama administration’s experiences.

The dynamics that prompted Obama to negotiate with Republicans in 2011 had started coalescing before the GOP won control of the House in the 2010 midterm election. After taking office in 2009, Obama’s first major legislative victory was the passage of a roughly $800 billion stimulus plan to help the economy recover from the 2008 financial collapse. Obama devoted the rest of 2009 to steering the landmark Affordable Care Act through Congress.

Read: The U.S. debt ceiling: A historical look

After Congress approved those expensive initiatives, Obama faced pressure from not only congressional Republicans but also a core of centrist Senate Democrats (including Senate Budget Committee Chair Kent Conrad of North Dakota) to develop some plan for reducing the federal deficit. Under prodding from Conrad, in February 2010 Obama appointed the bipartisan Simpson-Bowles commission to recommend a deficit-reduction plan. Throughout that year, “there was an awful lot of ‘grand bargain, let’s have a historic compromise’ in the air” in Washington, Jason Furman, the then– deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, told me.

Before the House changed hands in December 2010, Obama agreed with congressional Republicans on a major package to extend the tax cuts that had been passed under George W. Bush and to also temporarily reduce payroll taxes. Then, in April 2011, the Obama administration and Representative John Boehner, the new Republican House speaker, settled on a plan to fund the federal government through the remainder of the fiscal year.

So when Boehner and other Republicans put forward their demands to tie any debt-ceiling increase to cuts in federal spending, the Obama administration did not initially view the prospect of negotiations with horror, multiple former officials told me. Obama shared the belief that a “grand bargain” to control the long-term debt was a worthwhile goal. Furman said the former president considered it an “exciting opportunity.”

Jack Lew, who served as Obama’s director of the Office of Management of Budget (OMB) during the 2011 confrontation and as Treasury secretary in 2013, told me about another factor that contributed to the Obama administration’s willingness to engage: Negotiations that previous presidents Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton had had with Congress about the debt ceiling had not proved that disruptive. Debt-ceiling negotiations “up until 2011 had a different character than after 2011,” said Lew, who served as House Democratic aide in the 1980s and in the OMB for Clinton in the 1990s.

Armed with these convictions, the Obama team didn’t blanch, even when the new speaker went to New York in May 2011 to lay down what became known as the “Boehner Rule”: Republicans would demand one dollar in spending cuts for each dollar increase in the debt limit that they authorized. The two sides launched fiscal negotiations in talks led by Biden for the administration and Representative Eric Cantor for the House GOP.

As these negotiations unfolded, Boehner framed the talks as the Republicans and Obama equally benefiting from the stipulations. But the White House, including Biden, never saw things that way. The White House didn’t view the debt-ceiling increase primarily as a bargaining chip—they viewed it as the eventual legislative vehicle for moving through Congress whatever agreement the fiscal negotiation produced.

Even with that difference, the talks were serious and, for a while, productive. Biden praised Cantor and Cantor reciprocated. But in late June, the effort collapsed when it hit a familiar rock: The Republicans involved refused to consider raising taxes and Democrats would not agree to spending cuts unless they did.

Over the next few weeks, the speaker and the president, joined by only a few aides, then met for a series of secret negotiations to pursue a “grand bargain” on the deficit. The two men came close to an agreement. But their negotiations ultimately foundered when Obama and Boehner could not agree on the balance between tax increases and spending cuts. Like the Biden-Cantor talks earlier, the Obama-Boehner talks crashed in late July.

Only days before August 2, when the nation would face an unprecedented default, Obama, Biden and the congressional leaders in both parties gathered in the White House for a frantic final weekend of negotiations. The two sides were trying to avoid calamity in an environment of “pure acrimony,” Furman told me. “I think if you look at the photographs that [the White House photographer] Pete Souza took over the course of that weekend, you can look at our faces and you don’t need to hear any words,” Lew said. “If you ask President Obama about the two or three most gut-wrenching moments as president I have no doubt this would be on the list.”

Pete Souza / The White House

Even though the “grand bargain” evaporated, the two sides (with Biden and Mitch McConnell at the center of the negotiations) reached a complex deal over that weekend. In the first stage, Obama got an $900 billion increase in the debt ceiling coupled with $900 billion in spending cuts. The deal linked up to another $1.5 trillion increase in debt to the creation of a congressional “super committee” that would be guaranteed a floor vote on a plan to cut the deficit an equivalent amount. If the committee deadlocked, automatic spending cuts in defense and non-defense discretionary spending—what became known as sequestration—would be triggered. Though default was averted, months of these talks had led to a nearly universal recoil among the Obama team. There was no single meeting or moment when the president and his top advisers said, “Never again.” Instead, participants told me that that conclusion emerged organically. “I think the team around Obama really had a bad taste in their mouth after the 2011 episode and they really wanted to change the terms and dynamics of the debate, and that’s why they all embraced the idea that we can’t do this anymore,” Mark Patterson, the chief of staff at the time for Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, told me.

The White House frustration deepened in November 2011. The deficit reduction “super committee” was created in July but deadlocked on the same issue that had stymied previous bipartisan negotiation: the unwillingness of enough Republicans to accept tax increases that Democrats considered sufficient to justify big cuts in programs like Medicare and Medicaid. That stalemate triggered the severe sequestration reductions in discretionary spending—a squeeze that left Democrats fuming over the domestic cuts and Republicans incensed about the defense reductions.

All of that was the backdrop when House Republicans returned in 2013 with a new set of demands for raising the debt ceiling, which included unraveling Obama’s greatest legislative achievement, the Affordable Care Act. This time Obama declined to talk with Republicans. “In 2013, it was a very fresh memory that we got closer than anyone had ever come to defaulting,” Lew, who had by then become Treasury secretary, told me. From Obama on down, he said, there was a very strong sense that “we can’t ever be in [that] position again.”

House Republicans eventually conceded, passing an increase in the debt ceiling without any conditions in October 2013 and again the following year. In October 2015, Boehner, as his final act after announcing his intent to resign from Congress and vacate the speakership, engineered another extension that raised the debt ceiling through the remainder of Obama’s presidency while also loosening the sequestration cuts on both defense and domestic spending. Those three votes represented a sweeping victory for Obama’s new no-conditions approach to the debt ceiling.

Read: Nuclear strategists know how dangerous the debt fight is

Though Biden was among the most enthusiastic proponents of negotiations during Obama’s first term, no former officials recall him dissenting from the general rejection of that approach in Obama’s second. Notably, then–Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (who died in 2021) took no chances: As the 2013 debt-ceiling fight approached, he personally told Obama to sideline Biden from any talks, because he considered the vice president too willing to make concessions to his frequent negotiating partner, McConnell.

On every front, most experts consider the environment even less hospitable today than it was during Obama’s presidency for the kind of budget deal that House Republicans are now demanding in order to raise the debt ceiling. Although Obama’s team and many congressional Democrats genuinely believed that a big long-term deficit-reduction plan was both good politics and good economics, Biden, as well as most congressional Democrats today, are much more skeptical of that proposition. And though Republicans could at least formulate specific spending-cut demands back then, they are far less likely to reach consensus today on a meaningful deficit-reduction plan. That’s largely because more of them have come to recognize that their political base, centered on older white voters, is just fine with government spending targeted toward them—particularly Social Security, Medicare, and even Medicaid and the ACA, which Republicans in the Obama era considered the bull’s-eye for their deficit-reduction plans. Moreover, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has less control over his fractious conference than Boehner did, and McCarthy is even less willing than his predecessor to cross his most conservative membersBut though these factors argue against a big deficit deal, especially one linked to a debt-ceiling increase, Biden must find some way to authorize more debt. He’s already facing calls from Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia to establish another special deficit-reduction committee.

For now, the White House, while indicating that Biden is open to talking with Republicans about the budget on other tracks, is digging in against linking anything to the debt ceiling. A former Obama official familiar with the Biden team’s strategy told me the White House believes that approach “is a matter of principle.”

Biden and his team have taken from the Obama years the lesson that if they don’t negotiate against the debt limit, a sufficient number of Republicans will eventually back down because the economic consequences of default would be so catastrophic. Biden may expect, for instance, that enough House Republicans will join House Democrats in advancing a “discharge petition” that would allow an increase to pass the House without support from the GOP leadership. Biden may be right in that calculation. But Obama’s no-negotiating posture on the debt ceiling worked mostly because enough congressional Republicans back then were unwilling to plunge over the cliff into default. The White House and financial markets around the world are certain to face many white-knuckled moments before they learn whether that is still true today.

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Ronald Brownstein

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January 27, 2023