WASHINGTON – Now that President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have reached a deal to avoid a first-ever default on the nation’s debt, they are turning to an arduous task: Selling it to their allies.
Both leaders projected confidence over the weekend about an agreement struck late Saturday to raise the debt ceiling until 2025 in exchange for spending caps and other GOP demands. Biden, McCarthy and other leaders have less than a week to pull together the votes to shepherd the measure through a splintered Congress.
It will be an intricate dance, with both sides eager to tout wins they extracted without inadvertently tanking support for the agreement, details of which were made public Sunday. The first test will come Tuesday as a critical House committee takes its first vote.
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The sales job started over the weekend, including with a call Sunday between White House negotiators and House Democrats.
“If we had a Democratic White House, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, I think the budget would look different,” White House spokesman Ben LaBolt said Monday on MSNBC in response to initial criticism from some progressive lawmakers. “But we have a divided government.” Asked on CNN if the White House was concerned about the Rules Committee vote, LaBolt said that “we’ll leave to the speaker to win support from Republicans in Congress to move this forward.”
Even as lawmakers spent the Memorial Day recess in their districts, there were echoes of discontent that reached Washington. Hardline conservatives said the bill will not produce the scale of spending cuts they wanted, while liberal Democrats said they were uncomfortable with concessions Biden made on safety-net programs.
What’s next for the debt ceiling agreement in Congress?
• Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on Friday projected the government would be unable to make debt payments by June 5. To avoid default, Congress must pass the Biden-McCarthy agreement by then.
• The House Rules Committee will take up the debt ceiling legislation Tuesday and will hash out a rule to bring the measure to the floor. The debate could provide an early sign of whether Republicans who control the House will hold together to support the package McCarthy and Biden negotiated. Complicating that effort: To win the speakership this year, McCarthy named several conservatives to the powerful committee.
• Assuming the legislation clears the committee and then the House, it would then move to a divided Senate, where any one member could throw sand in the gears. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., warned his colleagues to prepare for a vote Friday or potentially into the weekend.
What’s in the Biden, McCarthy debt ceiling agreement?
The tentative deal raises the debt limit through the end of 2024, meaning that Washington won’t have to address the thorny issue again until after the next presidential election. Among the key provisions:
• Spending: The deal caps annual discretionary spending for two years. This means that funding for domestic programs across the board − besides Social Security and Medicare − will stay the same next year.
• Safety net: The agreement overhauls the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program by setting time limits for how long able-bodied adults 54 or younger without dependent children can receive food assistance if they do not meet certain work requirements. The deal contains additional work requirements for recipients of the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, but no changes to Medicaid, which Biden had ruled out.
• IRS: The deal partly rolls back a funding increase for the Internal Revenue Service that was designed to crack down on wealthy Americans and corporations that evade taxes.
• Student loans: The deal ends the pause on student loan payments that has been in place throughout the pandemic. That is separate from Biden’s plan to forgive an estimated $400 billion in student loan debt, a proposal that was challenged and is being reviewed by the Supreme Court.
