President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy have been working the phones in an intense push to sell Congress on the 99-page bill that would suspend the nation's debt limit through 2025 to avoid a federal default while limiting government spending.
Congress
The Biden administration is racing to strike a deal with Republicans as the nation careens toward a potentially catastrophic debt default if the government fails to increase the borrowing limit, now at $31 trillion, to keep paying the nation’s bills.
Crucial debt ceiling negotiations are still far from success, but a deal is possible by the end of the week, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said after a brief meeting Tuesday with President Joe Biden and other congressional leaders.
Freshman U.S. Rep. Jonathan Jackson, who succeeded longtime U.S. Rep. Bobby Rush in Illinois’ 1st Congressional District, said the debt ceiling debate has already gone on too long and threatens the standing of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Top lawmakers, including Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, had for months been asking the Justice Department to provide access to the documents — or at least an assessment of what was in them — so that Congress could gauge the potential national security harm.
In a presidential proclamation on Thursday and a subsequent statement on Friday, Biden acknowledged “a wave of discriminatory state laws” aimed at trans Americans, squarely blaming “MAGA extremists” for “advancing hundreds of hateful and extreme state laws that target transgender kids and their families.”
The deficit reduction goal is significantly higher than the $2 trillion that Biden had promised in his State of the Union address last month. It also is a sharp contrast with House Republicans, who have called for a path to a balanced budget but have yet to offer a blueprint.
“Ever since my final falling-out with the GOP, on the day of the deadly January 6 attack on the Capitol by Donald Trump’s followers, I have wanted to tell the inside story of how my party and also my faith have been hijacked by extremists who represent a real danger to our democracy,” Kinzinger said in a statement.
President Joe Biden checked those boxes, and a few more, during his speech to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night. In part, he seemed to be laying the foundation to run for a second term. “We’ve been sent here to finish the job,” he said.
His speech before a politically divided Congress comes as the nation struggles to make sense of confounding cross-currents at home and abroad — economic uncertainty, a wearying war in Ukraine, growing tensions with China among them — and warily sizes up Biden’s fitness for a likely reelection bid.
The Treasury Department said in a letter to congressional leaders it has started taking “extraordinary measures” as the government has run up against its legal borrowing capacity of $31.381 trillion. An artificially imposed cap, the debt ceiling has been increased roughly 80 times since the 1960s.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen formally put Congress on notice last week that the agency will have to start taking "extraordinary measures" after the US reaches its $31.4 trillion debt limit on Thursday.
Lawmakers no longer have to walk through metal detectors before gaining access to the House floor. And any time they do vote, they will have to do so in person — no more voting by proxy from home. Those are just some of the changes.
Eager to confront President Joe Biden and the Democrats, Kevin McCarthy promised subpoenas and investigations. “Now the hard work begins," the California Republican declared.
More than 930 people have been charged with federal crimes related to the siege on Jan. 6, 2021, and the tally increases by the week. Hundreds more people remain at large on the second anniversary of the unprecedented assault that was fueled by lies that the 2020 election was stolen.
Pressure was building as GOP party leader Kevin McCarthy lost a seventh, eighth and historic ninth round of voting, tying the number it took the last time this happened, 100 years ago, in a prolonged fight to choose a speaker in a disputed election.
