The government investigated itself—and you’re not allowed to see the results. On Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit ruled that the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) doesn’t apply to the Senate’s 2012 report on CIA torture programs. The decision blocks off an avenue to find out what’s in the 6,700-page paper, which the CIA has fought to keep under wraps for more than a decade.
The ruling comes after a small victory for transparency. On Friday, defense lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay military tribunal were allowed to release a photo of their defendant handcuffed and nude at a CIA black site in 2004. Defense lawyers have mentioned the existence of disturbing photos from black sites, but because almost all evidence at the Guantanamo trials is classified, they have never been able to release these photos to the public.
Over the weekend, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin canceled military prosecutors’ controversial plea deal for three accused Al Qaeda members. Their cases may go to trial—which would allow lawyers to uncover more evidence related to the CIA torture program.
The Senate investigation had been prompted by past CIA attempts to cover its tracks. After learning that the CIA had destroyed tapes of prisoners being tortured, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence began an investigation into the CIA’s entire interrogation program. (CIA officer Gina Haspel, who helped destroy the tapes and had personally watched torture sessions, later became CIA director during the Trump administration.)
By 2012, staffers had dug up reams of evidence on CIA malfeasance. They reported not only the specific torture methods, but also that the CIA had tortured innocent people (including a mentally challenged man and two of the agency’s own informants), that CIA leaders had lied to the public and Congress about the program, and that much of the intelligence gained under torture was useless or worse.
For example, the false reports linking Iraq to Al Qaeda, ultimately used to justify the Iraq War, may have come from a tortured prisoner, according to the Senate report. Another prisoner, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, was tortured into making a false terrorism confession. The militaryheld Slahi at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years before unceremoniously releasing him. FBI agent Ali Soufan—whose memoir the CIA also fought to keep secret—alleges that the CIA refused to believe a real confession warning about a real plot in 2002 because it wasn’t extracted under torture.
After the Senate committee finished its investigation, the CIA pushed hard to stop the results from seeing the light of day, arguing that the details must stay classified for national security reasons. When a Senate staffer locked up one incriminating document in a committee safe, fearing that the CIA would destroy it, the CIA proved his fears right by hacking into the Senate’s computer network.
The Senate was finally allowed to publish a 525-page summary of its findings in 2014, but the details remain classified to this day. Even some pseudonyms of CIA officers and code names for countries were censored in the declassified summary, making it impossible to piece together a coherent timeline of many events.
City University of New York law professor Douglas Cox tried a different route: a FOIA request. Although FOIA doesn’t apply to the Senate, it does apply to the executive branch. Luckily for Cox, the Senate committee had provided copies of the reports to different executive agencies, including the FBI, Department of Justice, Department of Defense, Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and Department of State.
Cox asked all of those agencies for their copy in December 2016. The Department of Justice argued that, even if it possessed a copy of the report, the document still belonged to the Senate, so FOIA didn’t apply. In June 2017, the Trump administration asked several of the agencies to return their copies to the Senate committee, hoping to prevent this kind of disclosure. Cox decided to sue, alleging that the administration was violating FOIA.
The case dragged on through years of appeals, and the Biden administration continued to fight Cox in court to keep details of CIA torture hidden. This week, a panel of three judges for the 2nd Circuit upheld the administration’s argument. The Senate “manifested a clear intent to control the report at the time of its creation, and because the Committee’s subsequent acts did not vitiate that intent, the report constitutes a congressional record not subject to FOIA,” the judges wrote.
The Senate committee had disagreed on what to do with the report. Late committee chair Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) wrote that the report “should be made available within the CIA and other components of the Executive Branch for use as broadly as appropriate to help make sure that this experience is never repeated.” But then-ranking member Richard Burr (R–N.C.) called the report a “highly classified and committee sensitive document” that “should not be entered into any executive branch system of records.”
Feinstein’s statement was “ambiguous over who retains full power over the ultimate disposition of the report,” and “does not clearly address whether the report may be disseminated outside of the Executive Branch to, for example, the public,” Judge William Nardini stated in the Monday ruling. So the torture report is still legally a Senate document, outside of FOIA.
Of course, nothing is stopping the Senate itself from releasing more of the torture report. But ordinary citizens apparently don’t have a right to sue for its disclosure. For now, that decision will have to be a political one.
On the night before Donald Trump’s second arraignment, Hillary Clinton appeared in her element. Former Barack Obama aide Jon Lovett was interviewing Clinton in a downtown Manhattan auditorium; a liberal New York audience welcomed her with a standing ovation. “Republicans have taken to the airwaves in response to these charges,” Lovett said of Trump’s federal indictment, “and they’ve come to one conclusion: we must prosecute Hillary Clinton.” The audience laughed. “When in doubt,” Clinton replied, to roaring applause.
The interview was for a live taping of Pod Save America, the podcast Lovett and three other alums of the Obama White House—Jon Favreau, Tommy Vietor, and Dan Pfeiffer— founded in 2017. This night, however, it was also for the Tribeca Film Festival. MSNBC’s Alex Wagner guest co-hosted, with special guests Clinton, New York Attorney General Letitia “Tish” James, and comedian Roy Wood Jr. At one point, the now infamous image of boxes of classified documents stored in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom from the indictment—which also ran on A1 of the New York Times over the weekend— was projected behind them on stage. “It isn’t shocking, but it is, I think, bracing to see in print just what a shambolick, small time, two-bit fucking criminal this guy is,” said Lovett, the comedian of the group. “If there’s one place in which, I have to say, I am sympathetic to Donald Trump, it is this: he would rather go to jail than clean out his closet,” he joked. The 913-seat theater was sold out to a mostly middle-aged audience, but I did spot some teenagers. One, an apparent Pod Save superfan there with his mother, sat next to me, howling and cheering as the hosts—and Wagner—sipped red wine out of plastic cups and discussed Trump’s growing legal woes. It was a night for communal, and unabashed, schadenfreude; the episode was titled “Re-Indicted And It Feels So Good (with Hillary Clinton!).”
Clinton’s appearance Monday night marked her first public response to Trump’s Florida indictment. “Did you have any reaction to the news, or are you keeping your powder dry in case you get jury duty in New York?” asked Lovett, who worked for Clinton before serving in the Obama White House. “You know, Jon, I have a lot of reactions to it, and I think the best reaction publicly is, you know, let’s see it unfold and see what happens,” she said. Lovett said this was a perfect transition to the Crooked Media merch that they’d brought her: a t-shirt that read, “Totally Impartial Potential Juror.” Clinton checked out the Crooked logo underneath the graphic. “You even put his nickname for me down at the bottom,” she laughed.
Republicans, apparently looking to change the subject from Trump becoming the first former president to face federal charges, have returned to their attacks on Clinton’s emails in recent days. “I do think it’s odd, let’s just say, to the point of being absurd, how that is their only response,” she said. The GOP’s efforts to defend Trump are “truly beyond anything that I ever thought possible in this country,” said Clinton. “It is so profoundly disturbing how this could have been the break. This could’ve been the opportunity to say, you know, thank you so much for everything you’ve done for us, we really appreciate it, but this is kind of serious, so we’re not going to continue to defend you. But no, they’re all in again. The psychology of this is so hard for me to fully grasp.”
At times during the event, the hosts struck a more sincere tone. There could be more instances where Trump—who prosecutors allege intentionally hid top secret documents (including on U.S. nuclear programs) in his personal residence, boasted about having them to people without security clearance, and obstructed an investigation into his possession of them—shared classified information beyond the instances captured on tape, they said. “We know that he showed off the secret Iran plan to some journalists, we know that he bragged to a guy from his PAC about what we think was probably a classified map of Afghanistan,” Vietor, who in a previous life was Obama’s National Security Council spokesperson, said. “We may never know what else got out there. I think that’s the thing that freaks out the intel people the most.”
James, meanwhile told Wagner and Pfeiffer that she’ll be watching Tuesday’s arraignment in the context of her own $250 million civil lawsuit against Trump, his children and the family business, in which she alleges the family engaged in more than a decade of fraud to rake in hundreds of millions in illegal gains (Trump has denied all wrongdoing). “In all likelihood, I believe that my case, as well as DA Bragg and the Georgia case, will unfortunately have to be adjourned pending the outcome of the federal case,” she said.
James wouldn’t talk about Trump’s most recent deposition, aside from that “he did attend, and he did answer the questions. But he did not look at me.”
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.”
So there you go: It’s a negotiation. Exactly what the two parties are discussing is only starting to become clear. According to variousreports, 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.”
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.
There were crises big and small in “America Decides,” Succession’s election night episode that aired Sunday. Tom Wambsgans lost his shit over a touchscreen Magic Wall breakdown inside the ATN newsroom—and over bodega sushi. Meanwhile, Roman and Kendall Roy’s business interests overshadowed actual vote totals as the outlet they own made key projections and eventually called the election for the conservative nominee. Both felt, after election night 2020, like scenarios that could actually happen. “There’s certainly dramatic and even outrageous storylines, but they’re taking place in a context that feels credible and legitimate,” says Eric Schultz, a consultant on the episode.
It was around this time in 2011 when Schultz joined Barack Obama’s White House. Republicans had just taken control of the House of Representatives, and Schultz, a political adviser, was hired to lead the Obama administration’s response to their countless investigations. A couple years later, he became Obama’s deputy White House press secretary, a role that led Jen Psaki to once describe him as Obama’s Olivia Pope, the fictional political-crisis fixer on ABC’s Scandal.
This past fall, Schultz found himself advising the writers of Succession to ensure their fictional presidential election cycle was as realistic as it could be, from election night vote tallies to the security footprint a candidate would have. Schultz has yet to leave Obamaworld: He continues to advise the former president out of Obama’s personal office, but he’s also been dipping his toes into entertainment, consulting on Designated Survivor and now Succession. He says working in the entertainment industry is not a far cry from life on campaigns, Capitol Hill, or even in the White House. Though, “fortunately, I’ve not encountered anyone who resembles the Roys in real life,” he says. Below, he speaks about bringing his political chops to Hollywood—and what it was like to recreate an election after the Donald Trump presidency.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed.
Vanity Fair:What was your role in this season ofSuccession?
Eric Schultz: They asked me to come up in the beginning of the season to help them sketch out the political storylines for the season, and then [I] stayed engaged for the episode scripts. But the bulk of my work was focused on this episode.
And so they asked me to be on set for the filming of election night. I think there’s just pieces and sort of texture that they wanted to make sure they got right. The writers are brilliant. I think what makes the show pop is this attention to detail about which they’re writing. That’s why they bring in subject matter experts. There’s certainly dramatic and even outrageous storylines, but they’re taking place in a context that feels credible and legitimate. And I think that’s why the show is so successful.
There was no detail too small to flag for them or that they didn’t wanna talk through. In episode four, when they talk of the presidential candidate [Jeryd] Mencken coming to Logan’s home, they asked what the security footprint would be for a stop like that—for Secret Service for a presidential candidate. I sort of walked them through what that would look like, and you would call this an OTR stop—one that’s not previously announced. And so we talked about it, and then they said, “Okay, fine, but what kind of vests would the dogs wear?” And I was like, “I will have to get back to you on that.”
What aspects of this election night episode did you specifically advise on?
If you watched the timeline of the evening, as states report and their Electoral College votes are counted, that was all very thoroughly researched to make sure it tracks a plausible election night. We spent a lot of time with the writers breaking down how states would likely vote and what the electoral count looks like under various scenarios and at various times of the night. It was important to them to make sure that everything was against a plausible backdrop. Obviously, the fire being located in Wisconsin was not an accident. We had looked at other states but wanted to find a place that fit into the timing of the evening, and that would also be a venue that had a sufficient number of votes to be determinative. We also worked with other consultants, [filmmaker] Justin Geldzahler and [GOP lawyer] Ben Ginsberg, to do due diligence on the contingency plannings for what would happen in these scenarios. The banter that Shiv talks about—in terms of proposing a revote and the Milwaukee County Board of Elections—all of that stuff is not shooting from the hip. It was material that we looked into.
White House Deputy Press Secretary Eric Schultz speaks during a briefing in the Brady Briefing Room of the White House on July 29, 2015.
The Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010 by former President Barack Obama, has expanded health insurance coverage across the U.S. and significantly reduced racial and ethnic disparities in access to healthcare, according to a new report by the Commonwealth Fund.
Coverage inequities between Black, Hispanic, and white adults have narrowed substantially since 2013. All groups reported improvements between 2019 and 2021.
The Commonwealth Fund
“Since its passage in 2010, the Affordable Care Act (ACA) has helped cut the U.S. uninsured rate nearly in half while significantly reducing racial and ethnic disparities in both insurance coverage and access to care — particularly in states that expanded their Medicaid programs,” reads the report.
Data shows that prior to the 2013 implementation of the Medicaid expansion — a provision of the ACA that made more families eligible for Medicaid coverage — 40.2% of the Hispanic population, 24.4% of the Black population, and 14.5% of the White population were uninsured in America. However, by 2021, those numbers dropped significantly to 24.5%, 13.5%, and 8.2%, respectively.
Uninsured rates for Black and Hispanic adults improved considerably in several states between 2019 and 2021, while white adults experienced modest gains in most regions.
The Commonwealth Fund
With more than five million people gaining coverage between 2020 and 2022 over the course of the pandemic, the overall uninsured rate in the U.S. dropped to just 8%, a historic low, according to the report.
The report highlights specific ACA successes, including improved coverage rates for Black, Hispanic and White adults.
“The coverage gap between Black and White adults dropped from 9.9 to 5.3 percentage points, while the gap between Hispanic and White adults dropped from 25.7 to 16.3 points,” according to the the study.
Additionally, the report found that adult uninsured rates for Black, Hispanic, and White people all improved during the first two years of the pandemic across all states — whether they had expanded their Medicare coverage or not — and that Black and Hispanic adults experienced larger gains in insurance coverage than their White counterparts between from 2019 to 2021.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Former U.S. Ambassador to Russia John Sullivan, CBS News national security contributor Michael Morell, former Obama administration undersecretary of defense for policy Michele Fluornoy and former Trump administration national security adviser H.R. McMaster discuss what’s ahead on the foreign policy front.
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