We recently reported that McCarthy caught the Democrats with their pants down.
On April 26, 2023, McCarthy got the House to pass the debt-ceiling increase Biden wanted but attached a list of things that the GOP wanted. The Speaker of the House also got the blessing of the Senate Republicans totally catching the Democrats off guard.
From Politico:
But once it became clear that McCarthy lacked the influence to wrangle his conference, Biden’s team reasoned, Republicans would lose most of their leverage and eventually soften their demand for concessions. The White House had harbored doubts about the bill’s chances of success even after McCarthy announced plans for a vote, privately questioning whether he could win over the last handful of conservatives trying to push the bill further to the right.
Last week, White House insiders told Politico they really didn’t have a plan and were thinking about changing the verbiage. After the bill passed, the White House said they won’t negotiate on the debt but will discuss the “budget.”
However, insiders at the DNC didn’t like the vocabulary change.
“I don’t think that it should be a debt ceiling negotiation, I think that it should be a budget negotiation,” said Robert Wolf, a prominent Democratic fundraiser, and former Obama-era adviser, admitting the verbiage change as threading the needle.
That’s all water under the bridge now after the Biden administration made known they’ve caved and said they’d negotiate with McCarthy.
A few days after Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “We are not negotiating on this[budget].” The White House called McCarthy – who is in Israel – to schedule a meeting before the May 9 deadline.
Meanwhile, Democrats in the Senate are holding hearings on the “reckless” House GOP bill hoping to “expose the true impact of this” legislation. However, Schumer nor the Democrats in the Senate have put forward a bill to counter the GOP.
The Republicans in the House are the only ones that have put forward a bill, and now it appears they are holding all the cards.
