WASHINGTON – Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy said on Monday that “decisions should be made” in a gathering with President Joe Biden later on the White House with only 10 days left before the US risks default.
“We’d like to have a move” to make progress towards a deal to lift the debt ceiling, McCarthy told reporters on Capitol Hill. “I do know where I feel people should give you the chance to go.”
Just before the meeting, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen confirmed June 1 because the earliest date, america may very well be at serious risk of debt default.
McCarthy acknowledged that the realities of the legislative calendar have added pressure to his meeting with Biden, which is scheduled to happen within the Oval Office at 5:30 p.m. EST.
“I feel we will make a deal tonight, we will make a deal tomorrow but you might have to do something this week to give you the chance to pass it [in the House] and move it to the Senate” in time to satisfy the June 1 deadline, he said.
The Home is currently scheduled to depart for Memorial Day weekend, but McCarthy said he’ll keep the House in session for so long as essential to pass the bill. “We’re staying and we will do our job,” he said.
McCarthy spoke on Monday after three hours of negotiations between White House and House Republican envoys. One of the GOP negotiators, Congressman Patrick McHenry, RN.C., later said he was “concerned about getting a deal that would undergo the House of Representatives, the Senate and be signed by the president.”
“It’s complicated math,” McHenry told CNN. “We’re at a really sensitive point here and the goal is to get something that may be implemented,” he added.
McHenry was joined within the talks by representative Garret Graves, R-La. The White House team consists of Presidential Advisor Steve Ricchetti, Director of the Office of Management and Budget Shalanda Young, and Director of Laws Louisa Terrell.
Yellen has repeatedly warned Congress and the general public that the US faces a troublesome deadline to lift the debt ceiling before early June.
“We expect to be unable to pay all of our bills in early June, possibly as early as June 1,” Yellen told NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday.
“I’d estimate the percentages of attending to June 15 once we’re in a position to pay all our bills is pretty low,” she said, with the caveat that there’ll at all times be uncertainty about exact income and payments.
Each Biden and McCarthy acknowledged that one of the foremost points of contention within the talks stays the difficulty of spending caps, a key GOP demand but to date a red line for the White House. Raising the debt ceiling wouldn’t authorize recent spending, but Republicans pushed for radical cuts in government spending as part of the debt ceiling increase deal.
“The essential problem is that the Democrats have been hooked on spending since they won the bulk. And it should end. We will spend lower than we spent last yr,” McCarthy told reporters Monday morning on the Capitol. .
Biden hopes to succeed in a debt ceiling agreement that will push the subsequent deadline beyond the 2024 presidential election. But House Republicans, who’ve only backed a one-year hike to date, say if Biden wants more time, he’ll must conform to much more cuts.
Biden and McCarthy’s meeting comes after a dramatic weekend where talks collapsed on Friday over a government spending impasse but resumed hours later.
The 2 leaders then spoke on the phone Sunday night, a conversation they described as “productive”.
Over the weekend, the president accused Republicans of wanting to exempt huge chunks of federal discretionary spending from their proposed budget cuts, including defense and potentially veterans advantages.
Biden explained that if those categories were indeed to be excluded, cuts to all other discretionary spending would must be much deeper to make up the difference.
General cuts like these “make absolutely no sense,” Biden said Sunday in Japan, where he attended a Group of Seven summit. “It is time for Republicans to just accept that there is no such thing as a bilateral deal that may be made solely, solely on their partisan terms.”