Tag: Kevin McCarthy

White House escalates political pressure on GOP as McCarthy unveils debt limit proposal | CNN Politics

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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 positions of the two sides remain unchanged – and completely incompatible. Biden and his top advisers say unequivocally they will not negotiate over a debt ceiling increase and will only accept a clean proposal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit. McCarthy and House Republicans have labeled that position a non-starter and are demanding significant spending cuts in order to sign on to any increase.

The irreconcilable positions underscore the central importance of winning the political and messaging battle that is set to dramatically intensify. With no pathway to reconcile the respective positions, both sides are pointing to the political pressure – and potentially catastrophic economic consequences that would result in a failure to a find a resolution – as critical to crack their opposition.

Biden’s speech was crafted to crystallize a clear political contrast and detail the legislative wins of Biden’s first two years in office and his agenda’s priorities for the years ahead.

But the speech was also tailored to directly attack McCarthy and the broad outlines of the California Republican’s forthcoming proposal at the same moment behind the scenes efforts to keep Democrats unified and escalate outside pressure.

“Folks, it’s the same old trickle-down dressed up in MAGA clothing,” Biden said of McCarthy’s proposal in his remarks. “Only worse.”

White House officials quietly circulated messaging and polling memos touting Biden’s budget and tax proposal earlier this week. Biden spoke by phone with Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Tuesday in what people familiar with the call framed as a discussion that was equal parts ensuring total alignment and mapping out the policy and political strategy ahead.

“President Biden, Leader Schumer, and Leader Jeffries agree that we won’t negotiate over default and Republicans should pass a clean bill like they did three times in the previous administration,” the White House said in a readout of the call Tuesday night.

Outside advocacy groups aligned with the White House are also set to ramp up their efforts to highlight Biden’s agenda while attacking the outlines of McCarthy’s proposal.

The tightly coordinated messaging and political escalation reflects a deadline that is growing closer, officials said. But it also underscores an understanding that McCarthy and his leadership team face their own critical intraparty moment as they attempt to coalesce around their own proposal ahead of a vote next week.

That House Republican plan, should McCarthy whip the votes to pass it, is dead on arrival in the Senate. White House officials view the proposal less as a tangible way to shift the entrenched political dynamics and more as an opportunity to launch a whole new array of policy attacks, officials say.

Republicans have made clear, however, they view the opposite as true. A House-passed bill should force Biden to the table and serve as a demonstration of Republican unity and resolve.

“President Biden and Senator Schumer have no right to play politics with the debt ceiling,” McCarthy said on the House floor Wednesday, calling on Biden and Democrats to enter negotiations.

McCarthy has insisted he can marshal the votes to pass his proposal. White House officials have privately been skeptical that’s the case given the fractious dynamics of the conference.

But at a critical moment in a fight that is set to envelope Washington in the months ahead, White House officials are intent on making McCarthy’s job as difficult as possible.

“The American people should know about the competing economic visions of the country that are really at stake right now,” Biden said.

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April 12, 2021
McCarthy and hardliners reach tentative agreement to resume House floor business | CNN Politics

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Hardline conservatives have agreed to end their blockade of the House floor while they continue discussions with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy about future spending decisions and a new “power-sharing agreement,” according to multiple members leaving the speaker’s office.

Conservatives who had voted against a procedural vote in retaliation for how GOP leadership handled the debt ceiling deal now say they are willing to support the procedural vote, after they received new commitments from McCarthy about how the California Republican plans to operate going forward, though they said the exact details are still being worked out and did not say whether they would ever be made public or put into a written statement.

“I think you’re gonna see an agreement to move forward in the next day or two on moving the legislation we wanted to move last week,” said Rep. Bob Good, a Virginia Republican who has repeatedly criticized McCarthy.

Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican, said of the nearly hourlong meeting in McCarthy’s office: “We aired our issues. We want to see this move forward as a body.”

Norman said one of the things McCarthy agreed to was to involve conservatives more directly in future decision making.

A group of hardline conservatives have held up legislative action in the GOP-led House for nearly a week in protest of the deal McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden to raise the nation’s borrowing limit last month. Conservatives wanted the debt ceiling deal to cut more federal spending than it did, and several far-right members of McCarthy’s conference accused him of reneging on commitments he made to them in private in order to win the speakership in January.

McCarthy told the hardliners Monday that he wouldn’t have cut the debt ceiling deal had he known it would “divide us,” according to a GOP source familiar with the meeting.

But McCarthy knew at the time that not all his members were going to be on board with the deal, with many of them publicly expressing their concerns with the direction of the talks.

One of the concessions McCarthy agreed to as part of Monday’s developments was an ironclad commitment to bring a pistol brace bill from GOP Rep. Andrew Clyde of Georgia to the floor. Leadership has agreed to incorporate the bill, which would block a new Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives rule on pistol braces, into an upcoming procedural vote.

That vote, which is slated for Tuesday, will now combine a rule for the pistol brace bill with a rule for a gas stoves bill as well as a bill to rein in the administration’s regulatory powers.

GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida said, “The power-sharing agreement that we entered into in January with McCarthy … it has to be renegotiated, so what happened on this debt ceiling bill never happens again.”

Specifically, Gaetz said the hardliners want more tools to put more “downward pressure on spending,” and want a return to fiscal 2022 spending levels.

House Appropriations Chairwoman Kay Granger announced Monday night that her panel will take up spending bills that would roll back funding to the levels demanded by the hardliners, a move that could ease tensions between the group and McCarthy while generating backlash from the White House and Senate Democrats.

Gaetz said that while they’re willing to end their stand against the procedural vote this week, he warned that they’re willing to oppose future procedural votes if they don’t get their way.

“If there’s not a renegotiated power sharing agreement then perhaps we’ll be here next week,” he said.

House Freedom Caucus Chairman Scott Perry of Pennsylvania confirmed they’ve reached a “framework for moving forward” but did not provide details.

Rep. Dusty Johnson of South Dakota, leaving McCarthy’s office, said they have a path forward now but said there will be no votes in the House tonight, as they had previously planned.

This story has been updated with additional information.

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April 12, 2021
Klobuchar says Biden and McCarthy should negotiate over budget, not debt limit | CNN Politics

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Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota said Sunday that she believes President Joe Biden should sit down with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and negotiate Republicans’ proposed spending cuts, but she insisted those talks should be in relation to the federal budget – not raising the debt limit.

“Of course, President Biden should sit down with Speaker McCarthy,” Klobuchar told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” ahead of the House’s expected vote this week on McCarthy’s bill to raise the debt limit. “But let me put an idea out there. The proposal that McCarthy has put forward, that belongs in the budget. … Our main goal right now is to make clear that we are going to avoid default.”

“They should start those negotiations now,” the senator added.

McCarthy introduced a proposal last week to raise the nation’s $31.4 trillion debt limit by an additional $1.5 trillion in exchange for cuts to domestic spending programs across the board.

But Biden and his top advisers have said they will not negotiate a debt ceiling increase and will only accept a clean proposal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

The US hit its debt ceiling in January and can’t continue to borrow to meet its obligations unless Congress raises or suspends it. The Treasury Department is avoiding default – which would happen this summer or early fall – by using a combination of cash on hand and “extraordinary measures,” which should last at least until early June, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said in January.

A breach of the US debt ceiling risks sparking a 2008-style economic catastrophe that could wipe out millions of jobs and set America back for generations, Moody’s Analytics has warned.

McCarthy said Sunday he believes he will secure the necessary votes to pass his debt limit bill, telling Fox News, “We will hold a vote this week, we will pass it and send it to the Senate.”

The California Republican also repeatedly criticized Biden over his refusal to negotiate a debt limit plan. The White House has attacked the GOP debt limit proposal as a nonstarter and something that would take the country to a “totally irresponsible” debt default.

“I’m beginning to wonder about the words that he says and the thoughts that he’s using, because the idea that he won’t even negotiate for more than 80 days, he is now putting the country in default. We are the only ones being responsible and sensible about this,” McCarthy said.

Meanwhile, Klobuchar, in her interview Sunday, also addressed concerns regarding the continued absence of her Senate colleague Dianne Feinstein, who is recovering from shingles. The California Democrat’s absence has kept her party from advancing certain Biden judicial nominees out of the Judiciary Committee, on which she serves.

“She has served our country well. She has said she’s coming back. And we await her return,” Klobuchar said when asked whether she agrees with Democrats who have called on Feinstein to resign.

Feinstein’s return, Klobuchar said, would “resolve the problem” over the holdup in moving certain nominations through the Judiciary panel.

Klobuchar added, however, that “at some point, when we have debt ceiling votes and the like, there may be another consideration that she will have to make with her family.”

With Biden preparing to launch his reelection campaign this week, Klobuchar said the president will have an “incredibly strong record” to run on, ignoring concerns raised over his age.

“He is a steady hand, when you look at what’s out there right now, with Donald Trump and what we’re hearing again. People don’t want that chaos back again,” she said.

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April 12, 2021
Conservative House floor blockade ends but GOP tensions persist | CNN Politics

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The House advanced a slate of bills Tuesday afternoon, bringing a floor blockade to an end after a tentative agreement was reached between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and hardline conservatives who had brought the chamber floor to a halt in retaliation over how GOP leadership handled the debt ceiling deal.

The stalemate is at an end for now, but tensions continue to erupt in the House Republican conference, including from moderates frustrated and angry at conservatives for halting floor action.

The floor blockade also showed how a relatively small faction of conservatives can derail or hold hostage McCarthy’s agenda – and the hardliners have made clear they reserve the right to use every tool available to them to potentially make life harder for GOP leadership in the future.

With the stalemate over at least for now, the House held votes Tuesday evening, including passing a measure to block a pistol brace regulation and failing to override a presidential veto on a measure to overturn a DC policing bill aimed at accountability and reform.

Multiple members leaving the speaker’s office on Monday said the hardline conservatives agreed to end the blockade while they continue discussions with McCarthy about future spending decisions and a new “power-sharing agreement,” though they said the exact details are still being worked out and did not say whether they would ever be made public or put into a written statement.

But even with the news that House action will proceed, frustration among moderates over the blockade was on full display Tuesday morning during a closed-door GOP conference meeting.

GOP Rep. Derrick Van Orden of Minnesota slammed the House Freedom Caucus blockade of the House floor in a heated, expletive-laden speech during the closed-door meeting, according to multiple sources in the room.

Orden got up at the mics and said his daughter is dying of cancer, and yet he still “shows up to work every f—ing day,” and complained that he has been trying to introduce bills to save lives, specifically a train bill, but “it’s not shit that gets on Fox News.”

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas then responded and said he also has constituents he represents and that he came to Washington to shrink government. Roy declined to comment on the interaction after the meeting, but did defend his efforts to hold up the floor in exchange for more concessions from McCarthy.

Some members were happy Van Orden spoke up during the meeting, as they have been frustrated that a small band of hardliners have been able to hold things up.

Reps. Mike Lawler of New York and Tom McClintock of California also stood up to blast the hardliners for holding the floor hostage and warned that the House GOP cannot be controlled by a small faction.

House GOP leadership has attempted to downplay the issues within the conference.

McCarthy was asked by CNN about the drama inside the meeting and he called it “a little bit of fun.”

When CNN pressed House GOP Whip Tom Emmer on internal conference dynamics given the House has not voted in a week following the action by House Freedom Caucus, he said that “communication and respect” are key to moving forward with a unified conference.

The hardline conservatives who have held up legislative action have done so in protest of the deal McCarthy struck with President Joe Biden to raise the nation’s borrowing limit last month. Conservatives wanted the debt ceiling deal to cut more federal spending than it did, and several far-right members of McCarthy’s conference accused him of reneging on commitments he made to them in private in order to win the speakership in January.

After the meeting, Roy wouldn’t comment on the specific comments Van Orden made, but when asked by CNN to respond to frustrations from his colleagues over the floor standstill said, “Well, my experience in life is that the more Congress is open more than American people should be nervous. But the first five months this year we were united doing good things, and it’s my aim to get us back into that row boat.”

Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon said, “there was a little bit of slugging going on,” as he exited the meeting, but noted that 95% of the conference is on McCarthy’s side.

House Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar and Vice Chair Ted Lieu blasted House Republicans for shepherding through what they called a week of “chaos” in the lower chamber.

“We haven’t voted for about a week because the Republicans lost control of the House floor,” Lieu said. “So we had all this chaos, the forced shut down.”

This story and headline have been updated with additional developments.

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April 12, 2021
‘You’re wrong’: McCarthy answers his critics as he faces blowback from GOP hardliners | CNN Politics

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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer in February made a bold prediction about the GOP and the debt ceiling, asserting: “We don’t believe they have a plan that can pass with Republican votes in the House.”

He later insisted that the White House would not negotiate with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy on a debt ceiling increase and that ultimately Congress would lift the borrowing limit without any conditions at all.

“Clean, clean, clean,” he told CNN in April, referencing the push for a clean debt ceiling resolution.

But McCarthy ultimately passed a bill in April on GOP votes alone. He then later forced President Joe Biden to negotiate a debt limit suspension with spending cuts. And Wednesday night, the House passed the McCarthy-Biden deal by a 314-177 vote, even winning the backing of 149 House Republicans, more than half of his conference, and the support of 165 Democrats. The Senate passed the bill late Thursday night, and it now goes to Biden’s desk for his signature.

“You’re wrong,” an ebullient McCarthy said when asked about critics underestimating him.

After one of the longest speaker’s races in history, winning the gavel after an ugly 15-ballot fight, McCarthy has managed to navigate his ideologically divided conference and bring to an end the debt limit standoff – even to the surprise of some of his sharpest critics.

“I have been thinking about this day since before my vote for speaker because I knew the debt ceiling was coming,” McCarthy said at a news conference following the vote Wednesday night. “I wanted to make history.”

When asked if he underestimated the speaker, Schumer didn’t answer directly.

“No. 1, we avoided default – our number one goal, which we’ve been talking about from day one,” Schumer said. “No. 2, it is a far, far cry from where the Republicans started out.”

Democrats say if the speaker surprised them in the fiscal fight, it’s because they didn’t think he would hold the specter of the first-ever US default over the White House until Biden agreed to negotiate on his terms.

“I think the Republican House caucus is willing to go to default,” said Rep. Ted Lieu, a California Democrat. “When dealing with folks like that, it’s really hard to negotiate at all.”

But it didn’t come without a cost.

After the debt limit deal passed, Republican Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado told CNN that House conservatives will be having discussions about ousting McCarthy “in the next week or two,” although he didn’t commit to following through with that threat.

A fired-up Buck, who opposed the debt limit deal, told reporters that he has received calls from constituents about removing McCarthy from the speakership. “My constituents are furious and you know what’s so interesting about the calls in the district? They are not only ‘vote against this bill,’ but they are ‘take McCarthy out.’ That’s what the calls are coming in,” he said.

The same Republicans who held out their votes for McCarthy’s speakership bid in January hated the deal he struck, arguing that it failed to curtail spending or provide conservatives with key policy wins. Several have publicly talked about moving to oust him for the agreement.

Rep. Chip Roy, the Texas Republican who has vocally slammed the deal, promised a “reckoning” earlier this week after the agreement was reached. And Rep. Dan Bishop, the North Carolina Republican who publicly vowed to target the speaker and potentially oust him from his job, said of his confidence in McCarthy: “None. Zero. What basis is there for confidence?”

Still, there haven’t been signs yet that the hardline conservatives will actually move to oust the speaker.

During a House Freedom Caucus conference call Tuesday night, when the motion to vacate was briefly brought up, Chairman Scott Perry, a Pennsylvania Republican, dismissed the idea as “premature” and the conversation quickly moved on, according to a source on the call.

The source said that there have been private, “independent” discussions about the motion to vacate among some of McCarthy’s fiercest critics, but not among the Freedom Caucus as a whole, where there is far less appetite to go that route.

After facing an all-consuming debt limit battle for the last several months, McCarthy is ready for the next act of his young speakership – and he’s taking steps that can win over the far-right furious at him over his debt ceiling deal with the White House.

To win some of his critics back, he’s promising his members that he wants to set up a bipartisan commission to rein in sky-high deficits while also privately vowing to hold the line in the government funding fights to come.

Rep. Ralph Norman, a South Carolina Republican who said McCarthy has lost “some trust” by cutting the debt deal, told CNN that the speaker had promised that leadership would be “actively” involved in the appropriations process, saying that’s where “the next big debate” will be.

While the debt limit and spending has bitterly divided the GOP conference, McCarthy is now free to turn toward more unifying measures – and to go on the attack against the Biden administration instead of cutting a deal with the president. It’s one reason why McCarthy was OK with agreeing to the White House’s demand to suspend the debt limit until January 2025, ensuring the divisive issue won’t be litigated before the 2024 elections.

Asked what’s next now that the debt crisis is behind them, McCarthy told reporters: “We’ve got a number of things.”

“We’ve got to do appropriations,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of oversight work to do. I don’t know if you’ve followed … FBI Director Wray, not following through on our subpoena. Now he says he would let us look at the document,” McCarthy told reporters.

The focus internally is already shifting.

On Wednesday, House Oversight Chairman James Comer said his committee would begin contempt proceedings as early as next week against Wray, in a move that would serve up red meat to the right flank of the GOP conference.

Comer has demanded that the FBI turn over an internal law enforcement document related to an unverified allegation against Biden, and he said Wednesday that the FBI’s proposed accommodation to allow Comer to view the document would not be sufficient to stop contempt proceedings.

Another target for far-right Republicans is Alejandro Mayorkas, the Homeland Security secretary whom conservatives want to impeach over problems at the border.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a far-right Georgia Republican who backed McCarthy’s speakership in January, told reporters that she is willing to swallow the debt ceiling deal but said would like to see a “dessert” to go along with it – and specifically named the idea of impeaching Mayorkas or Wray.

This story has been updated to reflect the bill’s passage in the Senate.

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April 12, 2021
McCarthy floats potential impeachment inquiry into Garland over IRS whistleblower claims | CNN Politics

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Speaker Kevin McCarthy is floating the possibility that the House could open an impeachment inquiry into Attorney General Merrick Garland over Internal Revenue Service whistleblower allegations that Justice Department leadership improperly interfered in the Hunter Biden probe, which Garland has denied.

“If it comes true what the IRS whistleblower is saying, we’re going to start impeachment inquiries on the attorney general,” McCarthy said Monday on Fox News.

In congressional testimony publicly released on Thursday, two IRS whistleblowers alleged to lawmakers that the president’s son had been given preferential treatment by the Justice Department.

McCarthy said on Fox News that the IRS agents who came forward “watched the abuse of power in how Hunter Biden was treated.”

The allegation that the DOJ has been politicized against conservatives has been central to how House Republicans approach their congressional investigations, though there is scant evidence backing up most of their claims.

Garland rejected those claim during a Friday news conference.

“Some have chosen to attack the integrity of the Justice Department … by claiming that we do not treat like cases alike,” Garland said. “This constitutes an attack on an instutiton that is essential to American democracy … nothing could be further from the truth.”

Regarding the Hunter Biden probe, the whistleblowers made several explosive allegations, including that the IRS had recommended far more serious charges for the president’s son and that US Attorney in Delaware David Weiss was blocked from bringing charges in other states.

Garland said Friday that Weiss was “permitted to continue his investigation and to make a decision to prosecute any way in which he wanted to and in any district in which he wanted to.”

“I don’t know how it would be possible for anybody to block him from bringing a prosecution, given that he has this authority,” Garland said.

Hunter Biden will plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and struck a deal with federal prosecutors to resolve a felony gun charge, the Justice Department said Tuesday in court filings.

As part of the plea agreement, the Justice Department has agreed to recommend a sentence of probation for the two counts of failing to pay taxes in a timely matter for the years 2017 and 2018, according to sources. Hunter Biden owed at least $100,000 in federal taxes for 2017, and at least $100,000 in 2018, but did not pay what was due to the IRS by the deadlines.

A judge will have the final say on any sentence.

Garland said Friday he would “support Mr. Weiss explaining or testifying” about the allegations raised by the whistleblowers “when he deems it appropriate.”

McCarthy said on Fox News Monday, “We have requested by July 6, Weiss to come in and answer these questions because the IRS whistleblowers took copious notes.”

The federal prosecutor overseeing the Hunter Biden investigation sent a letter to House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan in early June saying that he had “ultimate authority” over the probe.

Weiss, who was appointed by former President Donald Trump, makes clear in a letter obtained by CNN that he was granted this authority, cutting against Republican claims that Garland and the DOJ are “weaponized” against conservatives and politicizing the Hunter Biden case.

“I want to make clear that, as the attorney general has stated, I have been granted ultimate authority over this matter, including responsibility for deciding where, when, and whether to file charges and for making decisions necessary to preserve the integrity of the prosecution, consistent with federal law, the Principles of Federal Prosecution, and Departmental regulations” Weiss wrote to Jordan on June 7.

In response, Jordan has asked Weiss to explain and provide further information about the letter stating he had “ultimate authority” over the probe.

Jordan asked in a letter to Weiss why he was the one to respond to Congress on June 7, when the initial letter from Jordan about alleged retaliation against the IRS whistleblowers was addressed to Garland. “Who instructed you to sign and send your June 7 letter to the committee?,” Jordan asked.

Hunter Biden’s lawyer pushed back in a statement on Friday against the whistleblowers’ claims, saying it was “preposterous and deeply irresponsible” to suggest that federal investigators “cut my client any slack” during their “extensive” five-year probe.

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April 12, 2021