In May, President Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy managed to prevent a default on the nation’s debt by reaching a last-minute agreement to suspend the debt ceiling until 2025 in exchange for two years of spending caps. Now, as budget season commences, lawmakers are faced with the responsibility of passing spending bills to ensure smooth functioning of the government.
With Republicans in charge of the House, their main goal is to cut spending more than what is outlined in the debt ceiling bill. On the flip side, Democrats in control of the Senate want to stick to the spending limits agreed upon.
Straight Arrow News contributor Newt Gingrich has some advice for Speaker McCarthy and his fellow House Republicans on what to do next.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans are at a real crossroads. They followed a strategy, a very sound strategy, of negotiating from strength. They found President Biden had adopted a position of not having any kind of spending cuts on the debt ceiling bill, and then only one out of every four Americans agreed with President Biden. Three out of four Americans thought either there shouldn’t be a bill at all, or that there should definitely be spending cuts on that bill.
The result was: Biden’s position was untenable. Then Biden went a step further and said he wouldn’t negotiate at a time when 70% of American people wanted the Republicans and the president to negotiate.
Ultimately, after 104 days of Speaker McCarthy going out to the press every single day saying, “Hey, I want to get this done, I want to avoid a debt ceiling crisis, I don’t know why the president won’t negotiate,” Biden finally collapsed, and, in fact, they negotiated.
It was a small step in the right direction. It did cut spending for the first time ever on a debt ceiling bill. It had changes towards work requirements for welfare, it eliminated the first year of hiring more IRS agents; it had a number of things that were reasonably good.
But where do they go from here? We learned from watching that particular fight that the margins are really narrow. Speaker McCarthy can only lose four members and still have a majority on his side in the House. The Senate Republicans had totally followed McCarthy’s lead, and, which I thought, frankly, was remarkable, and I was all in favor of. But the question now is, where are they as we go forward?
