President Joe Biden has disputed some of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy‘s (R-CA) characterizations of their hourlong meeting over the debt ceiling and contradicted a couple of statements the White House has made about his positions.
“We agreed to continue our discussions, and we’re going to meet again on Friday. In the meantime, our staff are going to meet today and daily between now and then,” Biden told reporters Tuesday in the Roosevelt Room. “I made clear during our meeting that default is not an option.”
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Biden additionally said he was “considering” using the 14th Amendment to resolve the debt ceiling crisis but expressed concern it would “have to be litigated, and in the meantime, without an extension, it’d still end up in the same place.”
Biden, who described the meeting as “productive,” repeated he was open to “a separate discussion about budget and spending priorities but not under the threat of default” and that Republicans have yet to detail what programs they would scrap. Conflicting with White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, the president also conceded he is open to a short-term extension and clawing back COVID-19 funds.
Biden went on to indicate that he trusted McCarthy “will try to do what he says” but that he does not “know how much leeway” McCarthy “thinks he has,” intimating the speaker was not “measured” at times during the meeting.
“I’m still committed, but obviously this is the single most important thing on the agenda,” Biden added of the possibility he may not attend the Group of Seven leaders meeting in Japan and the Quad summit in Australia next week.
McCarthy told reporters at the White House after the meeting that he “didn’t see any new movement” regarding their respective stances over a clean debt ceiling bill and concessions concerning spending cuts in exchange for extending the country’s borrowing cap. He, too, bemoaned Biden’s lack of compromise proposals.
“I’ve done everything in my power to make sure [the country] will not default,” he said. “We have passed a bill to raise the debt limit. Now, I haven’t seen that in the Senate, so I don’t know.”
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Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) explained afterward that the so-called big four’s staff will meet “as early as tonight, certainly tomorrow, to see where we can come to agreement on the budget and appropriations process” before their principals sit down to discuss the debt ceiling again on Friday.
“His bill doesn’t have a single Democrat in support, and it gets us nowhere because you have to negotiate to get this done,” Schumer said of McCarthy. “Take default off the table and let’s resume negotiations in the appropriations process.”
