President Joe Biden is meeting with congressional leaders at the White House on Tuesday as part of ongoing talks to raise the nation’s borrowing limit and avoid a historic default.
Biden is being joined in the Oval Office on Tuesday by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Anyone looking for clues as to how talks are progressing between Biden and congressional Republicans might be confused based on comments made ahead of the meeting, since the two principal leaders in the room have offered distinctly different takes on the state of play.
“I really think there’s a desire on their part, as well as ours, to reach an agreement,” Biden told reporters during a Sunday afternoon bike ride, describing himself as a “congenital optimist.”
Optimism was not the overwhelming sentiment from Biden’s foil – the House speaker.
“It doesn’t seem to me yet they want a deal, it just seems like they want to look like they are in a meeting but they aren’t talking anything serious,” McCarthy, a Republican from California, told reporters entering the Capitol on Monday.
The speaker told House Republicans in a closed-door meeting on Tuesday that talks could be hitting a rocky period, according to an attendee. McCarthy urged his caucus to stick together and insisted that the White House won’t get a “clean debt deal” – something Biden has asked to maintain alongside separate negotiations about the budget.
“We have 16 days left and he wants to spend eight abroad. We are stronger together. Stick together. Stay strong,” McCarthy said of Biden, according to another attendee.
The diametrically opposing outlooks lent Tuesday’s meeting a degree of uncertainty. Time is running short to raise the borrowing limit ahead of June 1, which is the earliest date the Treasury Department says the government could be unable to pay its bills. Biden is currently scheduled to depart Wednesday for Japan, where he will attend a Group of 7 summit.
White House aides have spent the past week in talks with congressional officials for negotiations that both sides characterize as constructive. But they haven’t yet produced a deal, and aides on both sides suggested an agreement wasn’t yet within reach.
Still, simply the act of talking is more than had occurred until a week ago. And the looming deadline has made clear both sides are committed to averting a default, which would send the economy into tailspin.
That seemed to be what provided Biden his rosy outlook this weekend.
“I think we’ll be able to do it,” he said.
Sticking points
Tuesday’s meeting was originally scheduled for last week, but both sides decided to postpone in order to give the staff-level talks space to proceed.
Ahead of the White House meeting McConnell criticized Biden for only scheduling two meetings with McCarthy and other congressional leaders in recent months as the pressure for resolving the debt ceiling crisis has increased.
“The speaker presented his case to the president back in February. House Republicans passed legislation to raise the debt ceiling back in April. But as of mid-May, the President of the United States has found just to two more occasions to sit down and discuss an agreement to preserve the nation’s full faith and credit,” McConnell said Tuesday.
Schumer has tried to drive home the point that Democrats see any possible agreement on spending cuts as a separate negotiation from the debt ceiling talks, which he insists must be increased without conditions.
“The talks are separate but simultaneous to our responsibility to avoid default,” Schumer said, adding, “Democrats welcome the debate about this year’s budget. For decades, both parties have regularly worked out their differences about spending and revenues throughout the appropriations process. That’s what’s happening right now, while we separately but simultaneously work to avoid default.”
Aides meeting at the staff-level have been working to identify issues with the highest potential for progress ahead of Tuesday’s meeting in the Oval Office. That includes limits on federal spending, clawing back some unspent pandemic aid and changes to permitting rules for domestic energy production.
It also includes the potential for tougher work requirements for some government aid programs, something Republicans have proposed in the discussions. Biden sounded guardedly open to such a provision Sunday.
“I voted for tougher aid programs (that are) in the law now, but for Medicaid it’s a different story,” he said. “And so I’m waiting to hear what their exact proposal is.”
Other Democrats have balked at the idea of bolstering work requirements.
Jeffries has told his colleagues he won’t accept new work requirements for social safety net programs, according to a person familiar with the matter. And Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin said it’s “ridiculous” that work requirements are at the center of debt ceiling negotiations. Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed have warned that they would not back a bill imposing new work requirements on Medicaid.
McCarthy, however, has said the issue is a red line.
“Every, every data point shows that it helps people move forward. So the public wants it, both parties want it, the idea that they want to put us into a default because they will not work with us on that is ludicrous to me,” McCarthy said Tuesday morning of work requirements.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise on Tuesday acknowledged that there is a chance the bill House Republicans passed to raise the nation’s debt ceiling will not be the final product if negotiations yield a deal both sides can agree to. But he also questioned how seriously Democrats are taking negotiations, saying he hopes Biden comes into the meeting and either says he supports the House GOP plan or has specific proposals as a counter offer.
“The president needs to come with very specific ideas,” Scalise said. “If the President goes into that meeting today and gives more empty rhetoric like he has in the past meetings, that will show he is not serious,” he added.
Louisiana Republican Rep. Garret Graves, McCarthy’s top confidant on the debt ceiling, told CNN’s Manu Raju that “there’s still a lot of distance” between the House Republicans and the White House on the debt limit.
Graves noted that the main issue is still spending levels, with work requirements for Medicaid emerging as a significant sticking point.
Jeffries has indicated that he believes a deal could include a debt limit increase through 2024 and changes to permitting laws to ease the approval of energy projects. He also thinks there could be some caps on discretionary spending and some Covid funds could be reclaimed.
But Graves on Tuesday emphasized that House Republicans are still not ready to discuss a short-term solution to give the principals more time to negotiate. “I’m not prepared at all, and I don’t think the speaker is, to put anything like that on the table,” he said.
Shalanda Young, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, outlined the impact of proposed Republican spending cuts in a new memo Tuesday, warning that if the GOP preserves funding for the Departments of Defense, Veterans Affairs and Homeland Security as they’ve suggested, it could lead to a 30% cut in spending for other federal agencies.
Biden’s upcoming travel abroad
Perhaps the greatest challenge to negotiators is the timeline. Biden’s aides had insisted the president still intended to depart Wednesday for Asia, where he hopes to reinforce US allies amid growing tensions with China.
There are currently no plans for Biden to cancel or change his upcoming foreign trip to Japan, but the White House is currently “reevaluating” stops to Papua New Guinea and Australia, National Security Council coordinator for strategic communications John Kirby said Tuesday.
“What I can speak to is the G7 and going to Hiroshima. The president is looking forward to that. We are taking a look at the rest of the trip,” Kirby told reporters, adding, that “there’s not been a cancellation as of yet, but that could happen. We’ll see where it goes.”
McCarthy said Monday a deal needs to be reached by this weekend in order for Congress to vote on it before the June 1 deadline. He was not optimistic that was possible.
“You got to have something by this weekend and we are nowhere near any of that,” he said.
Senate Minority Whip John Thune warned, “If we really are working on a June 1 deadline, then things need to start happening fairly quickly here.”
On Tuesday, McCarthy appeared to caution against the trip.
“Look, the President is the President of the United States. He can make that decision one way or another. But all I know is we got 16 more days to go. I don’t think I would spend eight days somewhere out of the country,” the speaker said. “I think the country wants an American president focused on solving American problems. That’s exactly what the House is doing.”
This story has been updated with additional developments.
CNN’s Manu Raju, Ted Barrett, Haley Talbot, Annie Grayer, Nicky Robertson, Allie Malloy and Alayna Treene contributed to this report.
Source: www.cnn.com