McCarthy holds line for deep spending cuts and other concessions from Democrats in debt deal
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) is holding firm in negotiations with the White House and Senate Democrats, pushing for deep spending cuts and other key concessions from the left in exchange for the lifting of the debt ceiling.
The White House has tried to float a spending freeze at current levels per sources involved in the negotiations, but McCarthy has pushed back against the administration’s proposal and is waiting for real reductions in spending levels.
While the sources involved say they don’t know exactly how much spending will be cut at this time, some say it could amount to tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in spending cuts, combined with caps on future years. discretionary non-military spending.
“This will be a historic deal,” a key staff member involved in the negotiations told Breitbart News.
Other major elements of the emerging deal that McCarthy has insisted on, sources say, include cuts to President Joe Biden’s plans to bring in new IRS agents, which were made as part of the Orwellian named “Inflation Reduction Act” in the last Congress. McCarthy, a source familiar with the matter, told Breitbart News, insisted on reducing the hiring of new IRS agents and is demanding that be part of the final deal.
“We know where our differences lie. We worked well until past midnight last night. We come back to it today to try to come to the conclusion,” McCarthy told reporters Thursday afternoon. “We need to have a deal worthy of the American public.”
Work demands on a variety of rights and wellbeing programs will almost certainly also be part of the deal, as will rollbacks of unspent COVID money nationwide, sources close to the ministry say. case.
All of these provisions, combined with the fact that the deal will almost certainly not raise taxes at all, equals a major Republican victory — and matches the framework McCarthy first laid out earlier this spring in a lengthy video interview. exclusive with Breitbart News.
Matthew Perdie, Jack Knudsen, Zenny Phuong
The White House and Democrats initially insisted there were no strings attached to raising the debt ceiling; they’ve been saying all year that they want a “clean” increase in the debt ceiling and they won’t settle for anything less.
However, following House Republicans’ adoption of their own out-of-chamber plan, which shocked political observers, influence shifted to the GOP.
Public polls, meanwhile, show McCarthy’s hand is strong in these negotiations. Clear majorities in the most recent polls indicate that Congress should only raise the debt ceiling in exchange for spending cuts, and in most polls, more people say they would blame Biden for a default if this one was happening as congressional republicans.
It all boils down to saying, as zero hour approaches, Republicans are actually using whatever influence they have to coerce the Democrats’ hand — something most conservatives aren’t used to seeing. in the modern era.
During the last GOP House majority, former Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan routinely caved to Democrat demands while sidelining conservative priorities, while for years Senate Republicans routinely undermined conservatives by conferring back-to-back major legislative victories to the Democrats.
But this time around, it seems to be going very differently because nearly everyone in Washington underestimated McCarthy: He successfully pushed through a GOP-led plan to raise the debt ceiling and cornered a White House who refused to negotiate at all and now appears poised to close the window on a deal that matches the hallmarks of what Republicans were looking to get into this process to begin with.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said late Thursday afternoon that talks with the White House were moving in a “more positive” direction, but warned they were not had “not yet arrived” in terms of concluding a deal.
The majority leader told members they could leave as planned for the weekend and the Memorial Day holiday, but would be given 24 hours’ notice to return to DC to vote if and when a deal was struck. concluded in the next few days.
Once that final deal emerges, if it does, then the real work of getting it through both chambers will begin.
House Majority Leader Steve Scalise is telling lawmakers to prepare for a potential debt ceiling deal over Memorial Day weekend.
McCarthy will seek to retain as many Republicans as possible – he will almost certainly need to secure a majority or more than House Republicans to vote for him, although some conservatives will likely criticize him and oppose the final passage.
Some members of the House Freedom Caucus, such as Representatives Dan Bishop (R-NC) and Bob Good (R-VA), told Breitbart News that their vote hinged on whether McCarthy would stick to the agreed terms. in Limit, Save, Grow Act, another Freedom Caucus Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) expounded in a Wednesday morning memo.
“We have the president and the Democrats on the ropes, and we must not let them go, and we must demand that the Senate pass our bill,” Good said.
Bishop added that preserving what was passed in the original bill is the “means of preserving Republican unity”, which Bishop said is “the most powerful tool available to the speaker…both for this confrontation and for all the others to come”.
If McCarthy sees defectors from some members of his party, Democrats will have to provide the remaining votes to pass it, then the plan would have to go through the Democratic-controlled Senate where Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY ) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) are both expected to provide a substantial number of votes for a GOP-crafted plan that wins White House Biden endorsement.
Given that hard-left Democrats in the House are already tearing up the White House on this front — people like Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) have lambasted the emerging deal — even once a deal is announced. , it is not sure thing to pass by Congress.
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