After months of Joe Biden ignoring the looming debt crisis and refusing to negotiate with Republicans, a preliminary agreement was made to raise the nation’s debt limit while also cutting government spending.
The deal, which was finalized Saturday night, would raise the debt limit through the end of 2024 in exchange for a cap on annual discretionary spending for two years and raising it by 1% in 2025. A series of cuts demanded by Republicans were also part of the deal. The White House had long opposed including spending cuts as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling, describing such cuts as “devastating.”
“We still have a lot of work to do,” House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said. “But I believe this is an agreement in principle that’s worthy of the American people. It has historic reductions in spending, consequential reforms that will lift people out of poverty into the workforce, and reins in government overreach. There are no new taxes, no new government programs.”
House GOP Speaker Kevin McCarthy announces the debt ceiling deal will have "historic reductions in spending…no new taxes, no new government programs…" pic.twitter.com/7VWACUXrfI
— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) May 28, 2023
The deal comes after Joe Biden and the White House were aggressively opposing Republican efforts to cut spending.
“It’s time for another side to move from their extreme positions because much of what they’ve already proposed is simply, quite frankly, unacceptable,” Biden said last week while in Japan. “It’s time for Republicans to accept that there’s no bipartisan deal to be made solely on their partisan terms. They have to move as well.”
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White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated the White House’s opposition to spending cuts on Thursday.
“We’re fighting against Republicans’ extreme, devastating proposal that would slash […] law enforcement, education, food assistance, all of these things are critical to American families who are just trying to make ends meet,” Jean-Pierre claimed Thursday.
The announcement of the tentative deal comes after polling showed that Biden was losing the debate on the issue. A recent poll conducted by Fox News in collaboration with Beacon Research and Shaw and Company Research found that a majority of Americans would hold Biden responsible in the event of a potential default, rather than House Speaker McCarthy or congressional Republicans, as Americans overwhelmingly agreed that spending cuts must be included in any deal raising the debt limit.
This put Biden in an unwinnable scenario as most Americans would blame him in the country went into default and agreeing to spending cuts would be a victory for the GOP. With the tentative deal reached, it’s looking like Joe Biden realized that he was in a political corner, and his capitulation further weakens him in advance of the 2024 elections.
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