The minority leader has so far distanced himself from next week’s negotiations, insisting any deal would have to come between the president and the House speaker.
“The speaker of the House has been sitting at the grown-ups table for months waiting for President Biden to act like a leader,” Mitch McConnell said Wednesday. | Francis Chung/POLITICOEveryone seems to want Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell at the debt ceiling negotiating table — except McConnell.
Biden and his team have consciously side-stepped the one-on-one negotiation Republicans want to have between the president and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. But they have calculated it is no longer politically tenable to have no talks at all. So they’re formally setting up a parallel track of conversations around raising the debt limit and addressing the budget, a coy way to talk about the GOP demands to reduce spending while keeping to the president’s pledge to not negotiate over default.
“The speaker of the House has been sitting at the grown-ups table for months waiting for President Biden to act like a leader,” McConnell said Wednesday. “I accept his invitation to join the meeting myself but I’ll continue to lend my support to the speaker.” Even after passing a debt limit package, they said, some administration officials have complained privately that it’s still unclear what McCarthy wants in the debt ceiling negotiation — or could even accept — given his tight margin in the House and the last-minute arm-twisting it took to line up 218 votes, several of whom openly admitted they were only supporting it to jumpstart cross-aisle talks.
Then there are the more tactical matters. Having the four leaders join Biden ensures that a slew of “he said, he said” stories don’t emerge from a one-on-one meeting. A veteran of the Obama White House who now works in the Biden White House recounted the frustration felt after meetings between then-President Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, when details were, in their view, often deceptively spun afterward to reporters.
Next week’s meeting comes as lawmakers prepare off-ramps to the debt ceiling standoff. Senior White House officials had initially hoped that the business community would aid their efforts by pressuring Republicans to accept a clean debt limit hike, for fear of putting the economy at risk.
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