Biden Says He’s Optimistic on Debt Talks
Noting that he has been through many such negotiations in his half-century in Washington, he made clear that he believed such positioning was little more than for show — presumably including the statement his own staff had issued barely an hour earlier. Each side, he indicated, needs to take a firm stand in order to extract the best deal for itself. That, he added, did not mean they could not eventually get to a consensus.
Mr. Biden’s public confidence in the prospects for a deal has stirred discontent among some liberals who fear he will give away too much to Mr. McCarthy’s Republicans, including work requirements for recipients of aid to the indigent. As it is, the president has essentially dropped his insistence that he would not negotiate spending constraints as part of an agreement to raise the debt ceiling; the White House maintains that the spending talks now underway are theoretically separate from the issue of raising the debt ceiling, a characterization few others accept.
For days, Mr. Biden and aides traveling with him in Japan have expressed optimism that they could work out a deal by the time the president returned to Washington on Sunday or shortly thereafter, in plenty of time to raise the debt ceiling before the nation would otherwise reach a default as early as June 1. It was unclear when negotiators planned to meet again. The White House has essentially cleared the president’s schedule for next week, presumably to allow for further talks.
In a further indication of how the talks had deteriorated, Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters at the Capitol on Saturday evening that he didn’t believe the negotiations would be able to “move forward” until Mr. Biden returned to the United States. “The White House is moving backward in negotiations,” he wrote on Twitter.
Mr. Biden’s comments to reporters on Saturday left a mixed set of messages in just a matter of hours. The White House started the day in Japan with a briefing by Karine Jean-Pierre, the press secretary, who offered a more measured assessment of the talks than the positive tone of recent days, saying that a deal would depend on whether Mr. McCarthy “will negotiate in good faith” and that everyone should recognize that “you don’t get everything you want.”
Source: The New York Times
