Key test ahead on debt deal

President Joe Biden said he feels good about the debt ceiling and budget deal negotiated with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy as the White House and congressional leaders work to ensure its passage this week in time to lift the nation’s borrowing limit and prevent a potentially disastrous U.S. default.

Signaling the tough days still ahead, McCarthy urged skeptical colleagues to “look at where the victories are.”

The Republican speaker said Tuesday he will be sitting down and talking with lawmakers as they return to Washington from the long Memorial Day weekend.

“This is just the first step,” McCarthy said of his agreement with Biden.

In an appearance on “Fox & Friends,” he sought to shore up support amid rising opposition from conservatives in his party. Unhelpfully for Biden, he said of the Democrats, “There’s nothing in the bill for them.”

A key test was coming late Tuesday when the House Rules Committee was to consider the package and vote on sending it to the full House for a vote expected today.

Quick approval by both the House and Senate would ensure government checks will continue to go out to Social Security recipients, veterans and others. The agreement includes expanded work requirements for some food aid recipients but not as stringent as many Republicans wanted.

Unsatisfied

A number of hard right conservatives are criticizing the deal as falling short of the deep spending cuts they wanted, while liberals decry policy changes such as new work requirements for older Americans in the food aid program.

Biden spent part of the Memorial Day holiday working the phones, calling lawmakers in both parties.

“I feel very good about it,” Biden told reporters Monday. “I’ve spoken to a number of the members,” he said, among them Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, a past partner in big bipartisan deals who largely has been sitting this one out.

To progressive Democrats raising concerns about the package, the president had a simple message: “Talk to me.”

As lawmakers size up the 99-page bill, few are expected to be fully satisfied with the final product. But Biden, a Democrat, and McCarthy, a Republican, are counting on pulling majority

support from the political center, a rarity in divided Washington, to join in voting to prevent a federal default.

McCarthy acknowledged the hard-fought compromise with Biden will not be “100% of what everybody wants” as he leads a slim House majority powered by hard-right conservatives.

Facing potential blowback from his conservative ranks, the Republican speaker will have to rely on upwards of half the House Democrats and half the House Republicans to push the debt ceiling package to passage.

Overall, the package is a tradeoff that would impose some spending reductions for the next two years, along with a suspension of the debt limit into January 2025, pushing the volatile political issue past the next presidential election. Raising the debt limit, now $31 trillion, would allow Treasury to continue borrowing to pay the nation’s already incurred bills.

Additionally, policy issues are raising the most objections from lawmakers.

Liberal lawmakers fought hard but were unable to stop new work requirements for people 50 to 54 who receive government food assistance and are otherwise able-bodied without dependents. The Republicans demanded the bolstered work requirements as part of the deal, but some say the changes to the food stamp program are not enough.

The Republicans were also pushing to beef up work requirements for health care and other aid; Biden refused to go along on those.

Pipeline at issue

Questions are also being raised about an unexpected provision that essentially gives congressional approval to the Mountain Valley Pipeline, a natural gas project important to Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., that many Democrats and others oppose as unhelpful in fighting climate change.

Manchin on Tuesday touted the inclusion of the Mountain Valley Pipeline project, saying it’s something “we know we need.”

Asked on West Virginia radio if Democrats would have still enough support to help pass the package, he said he thinks so. “All parties that were negotiating agreed that Mountain Valley Pipeline is in the national interest,” he said.

But the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources committee Rep. Raul Grijalva of Arizona said including the pipeline provision was “disturbing and profoundly disappointing.”