WASHINGTON — After weeks of tense wrangling between the White House and House Republicans, Saturday’s budget deal to raise the debt ceiling while limiting federal spending bolsters President Joe Biden’s argument that he is the only character who can still do bipartisanship in a deeply partisan milieu. time.
But it comes at the cost of the ire of many in his own party who have little appetite for meeting Republicans in the middle and think the president can’t help but give too much away in an eternal and fleeting quest for consensus. . And that will now test his influence on fellow Democrats he will need to push the deal through Congress.
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The tentative agreement he reached with President Kevin McCarthy represents a case study in the governance of Biden’s presidency, underscoring the fundamental tension in his leadership since the 2020 primaries when he defeated progressive rivals to win the Democratic nomination. Biden believes in his bones to reach the other side of the aisle, even at the expense of some of his own priorities.
He’s shown it repeatedly since his inauguration 2½ years ago, even as skeptics doubted cross-party hosting was still possible. Most notably, he pushed through Congress a bipartisan public works program allocating $1 trillion to build or repair roads, bridges, airports, broadband and other infrastructure; legislation expanding treatment for veterans exposed to toxic combustion sources; and an investment program to boost the national semiconductor industry, all of which passed with Republican votes.
This, however, is not a time when bipartisanship is valued as it was when Biden first came to the Senate in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. His drive to position himself as the leader capable of bringing a deeply divided country together is at the core of his case for a second term next year. But that conflicts with the interests of many Democrats who see more political benefit in standing firm against former President Donald Trump’s Republican Party and prefer to draw a sharper contrast for their own elections in 2024 when they hope to resume. bedroom.
“The deal also represents a compromise that means no one got everything they want, but that’s the government’s responsibility,” Biden told reporters at the White House on Sunday night.
More importantly, from Biden’s perspective, the deal averts a catastrophic national default that could have cost many jobs, slumped stock markets, jeopardized Social Security payments and stumped the economy. He’s betting on the assumption that Americans will appreciate mature leadership that doesn’t mess with the nation’s economic health.
But many on the political left are annoyed that Biden, in their view, gave in to McCarthy’s hostage-taking strategy. The president who said the debt ceiling was ‘non-negotiable’ ended up negotiating it after all to avoid a national default, barely caring about the fiction that the spending limit talks were somehow kind separated.
Liberals were pushing Biden to stiffen Republicans and completely bypass the debt ceiling by claiming the power to override it under the 14th Amendment, which states that the federal government’s “validity of public debt” “shall not not be questioned”. But while Biden agreed with the constitutional interpretation, he concluded it was too risky because the nation could still default while the matter was argued in court.
And so, much to the chagrin of his allies, negotiations in recent weeks have been conducted entirely on Republican terms. While details were still emerging this weekend, the final deal did not include any new Biden tax initiatives like higher taxes on the wealthy or expanded rebates for insulin. The question was essentially how much of the Limit, Save and Grow Act passed by House Republicans last month would the president accept in exchange for an increase in the debt ceiling.
But Biden managed to drastically reduce the Limit, Save and Grow Act from what it originally was, much to the dismay of conservative Republicans. Instead of raising the debt ceiling for less than a year while imposing hard caps on discretionary spending for 10 years, the agreement ties the two together so that the spending limits only last for two years, as well as raising the debt ceiling. While Republicans have insisted on basing the limits on a baseline of 2022 spending levels, the appropriations adjustments will effectively make them equivalent to the more favorable 2023 baseline.
As a result, the deal will cut planned spending over the decade by just a fraction of what Republicans were seeking. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that caps passed by House Republicans last month would have cut $3.2 trillion in discretionary spending over 10 years; a rough New York Times calculation suggests the deal Biden and McCarthy struck could instead shrink by a third or less.
Moreover, while Biden did not advance many new Democratic policy goals in the deal with McCarthy, he effectively shielded the bulk of his achievements from the first two years of his presidency from Republican efforts to dump them.
The Republican plan envisioned revoking many of the clean energy incentives Biden included in the Cut Inflation Act, eliminating additional funds for the IRS to hunt wealthy tax cheats, and stalling the president’s plan. to forgive $400 billion in student loans for millions of Americans. None of this was in the final package.
Indeed, the IRS provision offers an example of Biden’s negotiation. As a concession to Republicans, he agreed to cut about $10 billion a year for two years from the additional $80 billion previously allocated to the agency over the next decade, but most of that money will be used to avoid deeper discretionary spending cuts sought by Republicans.
One of the most sensitive areas for Biden’s progressive allies was the Republican insistence on imposing or extending work requirements on recipients of social safety net programs, including Medicaid, food assistance and welfare benefits. for families. Biden, who backed labor demands on welfare in the 1990s, initially signaled his openness to considering Republican proposals, only to face a backlash from Democrats.
On Friday night, even as the deal closed, the White House released a scathing statement accusing Republicans of trying to ‘take food out of the mouths of starving Americans’ while preserving tax cuts for the wealthy. – a broadside aimed as much at reassuring wayward liberals as assailing hard-line conservatives.
The final agreement between Biden and McCarthy does not include any work requirements for Medicaid, but raises the age of people who must work to receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, to 54 while still eliminating requirements for veterans and the homeless. The agreement moderates Republican provisions to expand work requirements for temporary assistance to needy families.
The challenge now for Biden is to sell the compromise to his fellow Democrats. Just as McCarthy knows he will potentially lose dozens of Republicans disappointed with the accommodations he has made, the president expects many in his own party to vote against the final product as well. But it must provide enough Democrats to offset GOP defections to forge a bipartisan majority.
Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., summed up the reaction of many in his party. “None of the things in the bill are a Democratic priority,” he said on “Fox News Sunday,” citing health care, climate change and other issues and adding that “these are priorities and not one of them is in this bill.”
But he added that Biden cut the final product. “The reason it may be popular with some Democrats is that it’s a very small bill.”
Sensitive to criticism, the White House sent briefing materials and talking points to every House Democrat minutes after the deal was struck Saturday night and followed up Sunday with phone calls. In his short meeting with reporters later in the day, Biden dismissed criticism from Democrats worried about giving too much. “They’ll find out I didn’t,” he said. As for the fear that the demands of the job will harm those in need of food, he said: “That is a ridiculous assertion.
Biden has been here before. As vice president, he served as President Barack Obama’s chief negotiator in several tax clashes, but he so aggravated his fellow Democrats who thought he gave too much away than Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, then leader of the party in the Senate, effectively banned Biden in 2013 from negotiations on raising the debt ceiling.
Kicking a VP out of the room, of course, is one thing. Biden is now the president and leader of his party heading into a re-election year. It’s his room. And he handles it on his own terms, like it or not.
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