Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP Photo
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell talk to reporters after meeting with President Joe Biden in the Oval Office of the White House, May 16, 2023.
On February 1, Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy met in the Oval Office. The readout of the meeting was useless, but Biden did deliver a message, at that meeting and for weeks afterward: The Speaker could come back to talk when he got a debt limit bill through the House. McCarthy would go on to whine that he didn’t hear from the president again for the next 97 days. Of course, McCarthy had the ability to accelerate that timeline: Pass a bill, and the next phase of the process could begin.
I do believe there was some inkling, at least within the White House, that McCarthy would never get that bill passed. It took a fairly superhuman effort for him to thread the needle of his caucus and find a majority, and then only when two Democrats missed the vote. You can’t fight something with nothing; if McCarthy couldn’t get consensus, at some point he’d have to acquiesce to a clean debt ceiling increase. That would have been humiliating and reasonably possible. It was worth going for from the Democrats’ perspective.
Even after House Republicans passed their bill—the Limit, Save, Grow Act (LSGA)—Democrats had some opportunities. The Limit, Save, Grow Act put frontline Republicans in tough districts on the record for throwing the country into a decade of budget austerity, cutting food assistance and health care for poor people, allowing tax cheats to go free, and ripping apart the historic investment in domestic manufacturing and industrial reshoring. Having Republicans negotiate against themselves for three months and getting them leashed to a bill that could be easily pummeled was a strategy that will be useful next November.
But November 2024 is 18 months away. In the here and now, passage of LSGA changed the contours of the fight. There’s a negotiation going on, as much as some Democrats don’t want to admit it. The White House is picking from a menu assembled by House Republicans, deciding how much of a ransom to offer in exchange for not destroying the global economy. And administration officials keep chattering about progress being made.
Sensing this change in the dynamics, the House Republicans have only grown more emboldened. McCarthy felt such urgency about talking to the president that he took a congressional delegation overseas immediately after passing LSGA, a subtle show of dominance. McCarthy’s house organ Punchbowl quoted him saying that stiffer work requirements for federal benefit programs were a must-have. (Biden set this off by first signaling some openness to work requirements, before sending a tweet that appeared to shut that down.) Other House Republicans are saying they want border restrictions, which weren’t even in LSGA, added to the package. And when the White House offered some tax loophole closures as part of the negotiations, House leaders flat out rejected them.
This is the new reality, where House Republicans are in control, alternately making demands and denying anything for the other side in exchange. This hostage negotiation has been appallingly normalized by the Beltway media, and progressive Democrats are rightly getting nervous. None of this happened until House Republicans passed a bill. By the conventions of D.C. etiquette, once that occurred, the Democrats had to “do something” to respond.
Mike Tyson had a saying that everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. The question is, what was the Democratic plan after McCarthy got a bill through the House?
One that seems fairly obvious would have been for the Senate to immediately vote down the LSGA. Senate Democrats have been unsparing about the bill’s impact—Chuck Schumer has been the attack dog in this fight—but they have not backed that up with a vote. If I understand the D.C. etiquette right, if the Senate voted LSGA down, the ball would shift back to McCarthy’s court, and he’d have to find something that could actually have a shot to pass the Senate. Or at least, that would be one media narrative.
But while Schumer has fast-tracked both LSGA and a clean debt ceiling bill, he hasn’t given McCarthy’s bill a vote since its April 26 passage.
There may be reasons for that. You could argue that a vote wasn’t necessary; LSGA was dead on arrival the moment the House passed it, and nobody in Washington seriously believes otherwise. In addition, some Senate Republican votes will be needed eventually for the ultimate agreement, and forcing them into a tough vote on LSGA could damage goodwill. (Of course, being a senator doesn’t mean being forever protected from the consequences of actions.) Having the House pass a bill with revenue in it (which cannot be initiated by the Senate) gives the Senate options to pass whatever the deal becomes and jam House Republicans, too.
But whatever the reason, Senate Democrats are living with the dynamics as they stand. They have not ferreted out Mitch McConnell, whose consistent line has been that Biden and McCarthy need to get together to solve the problem, insisting that he’s not involved. A vote would have forced his involvement. Furthermore, nobody has demonstrated in public that the bill McCarthy passed cannot win favor in the Senate, which could have provided a big flashing signal that McCarthy spent all that effort for nothing. It’s all been implied, and maybe that’s good enough for Washington—but too subtle for the country.
Biden had cards to play as well, but he’s in deal-making mode. McCarthy praised Biden after Tuesday’s principals meeting in the White House, saying that it “was a little more productive,” suggesting that things are moving in the House Speaker’s direction.
McCarthy still has his own hurdles to overcome. Nobody believes he’s prepared himself for the consequences of an actual deal, which will by definition be a climbdown from LSGA. You’re starting to see this skepticism crop up in the D.C. media, with Senate Republicans wondering if he can deliver a compromise at all. That centrist Democrats have run to their media organs to signal they would vote to save McCarthy if there’s a Republican bid to remove him after a debt ceiling compromise shows you the relative weakness of the Speaker’s position. That McCarthy, like McConnell, is also pleading for one-on-one talks with the president signals the same thing. But Biden agreed to that demand on Tuesday, thinning out the negotiators.
For now, McCarthy is riding a wave created by the House bill passage, and Biden, by opening negotiations, is surfing right into it. So far, the actions to get McCarthy off that wave have been insufficient. The D.C. media narratives that seemingly arbitrarily determine who’s up and who’s down in congressional fights are indeed stupid, but they have grave policy implications. Unless they change, bad things will happen to good people.
