Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden clash over $31trn debt ceiling
What happens when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object?
The question, of course, is an old paradox that doesn’t have an answer. In the US this week, however, we’ve been seeing something that approximates this puzzle, played out in political terms. What happens when a persuasive Democrat in the White House meets a strategically weak Republican Speaker of the House?
The meeting on Wednesday between President Joe Biden and Speaker Kevin McCarthy was an early indicator of how the next two years might play out. Biden met McCarthy in the hope of resolving a possible crisis over the debt limit, which currently stands at $31.4 trillion. For the moment, the crisis isn’t imminent, though as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen recently admitted, failure to raise the limit would amount to “a calamity”.
Any government shutdown would probably occur in eight months, yet the largesse of that timeframe doesn’t reflect the current state of the two parties. The sides need to agree on issues where they rarely come close to an agreement: on the nature of government spending and taxation. It’s the kind of expansive debate that can (and often does) turn into fierce arguments around gnarly details and, as politicians get bogged down on intractable points of ideology, the entire system can come crashing down. This happened twice under President Trump when Republicans and Democrats squabbled over the administration’s approach to immigration and the President’s obsession with a hugely costly (and ineffective) wall.
This time the dynamics are slightly different. Kevin McCarthy enters the negotiations doing a fairly good imitation of an immovable object, but the reality is that the new Speaker has a weaker hand. His position in the House is based upon the slimmest of margins. He can only afford to lose four votes.
In contrast, Joe Biden might not be the irresistible force but in terms of recent presidents, he’s doing a good approximation of a man with momentum. He has the considerable political capital of an improving global economic situation, falling inflation, and months of better-than-expected job figures. The US government is now expected to officially end the Covid-19 health emergency in May. The only real blip in recent weeks has been the distraction of classified government documents being found at his home, though Margaret Sullivan’s timely piece for The Guardian this week rightly points out that Biden’s oversight is very different to Trump’s scandal: “Biden has cooperated with the justice department’s search for documents, while Trump has obfuscated and resisted.”
After the meeting the White House reiterated that on the matter of defaulting on the debt, “[i]t is not negotiable or conditional”. It’s a firm opening statement but does not undercut the point that Biden has proven himself capable of flexibility. He’s always made bipartisanship a cornerstone of his political career and this has continued into the White House. He doesn’t just impart a lateral force but can dynamically shift the point of leverage.
This makes it more than likely that a deal will emerge sooner rather than later (though, obviously, a deal will have to be struck eventually). Already, Republicans in the Senate are making statements that highlight how a government shutdown doesn’t serve their best interests. How we get there is another matter. The politics are as simple as they are prone to deadlock. As a White House spokesman described to CNN: “As they vote for even more tax welfare for the rich, Republicans across the House conference are demanding cuts to Medicare and Social Security as ransom for not triggering an economic crisis.”
From the Republican perspective, the logic runs the other way, with Senator Mike Lee of Utah drawing an equally simple equivalency: “Any increase in the debt ceiling must be accompanied by cuts in federal spending of an equal or greater amount as the debt ceiling increase, or meaningful structural reform.”
As for the two men, they were clearly establishing their footings on Tuesday when Biden asked that McCarthy “commit to the bedrock principle that the United States will never default” and the Speaker responded with the platitudinous “I’m not interested in political games. I’m coming to negotiate for the American people.”
Yet even in his anodyne response, McCarthy is merely demonstrating how much of this amounts to posturing. He emerged from Wednesday’s meeting saying “I think at the end of the day, we can find common ground”. It was as promising as it was non-committal. Elsewhere in his party, Republicans have been muttering about cutting $130 billion from the budget without touching defence spending. In reality, none of that is likely to happen. Much more likely is a smaller compromise, of the kind advocated by Republican Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina who admitted that “It’d be great if we could do cuts across the board, but that’s not realistic […] So you have to be more targeted with the cuts.”
Mace reflects the broad reality of the Republican caucus. As we’ll see with the looming race to be the candidate in 2024, Republicans are too fragmented, and nothing looks likely to change that anytime soon. One should certainly set aside the media narrative of former president Trump being a spent force. He’s certainly not the all-conquering fireball that scorched the field in 2016 but he still brings heat to the contest. Donald Trump remains the front-runner and DeSantis’ nominee-in-waiting status is largely predicated on the belief that the media will boost the Florida governor in the coming months. With no unifying candidate, there is no Republican consensus, no single cohesive viewpoint on the Right. Trumpians will welcome the House’s investigations into the Biden family, but others will be appalled at what they perceive as a wasted opportunity to remind America that the GOP can be a force for stability. Factor in, too, the important independent voters who do not share the Republican’s taste for red meat and it’s hard to see their support expanding into this important demographic.
Even as we can expect the House to start making lots of noise about Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, laptops, China, and who knows what else, we should remember that these topics are not the stuff of election wins. Keeping that side of the party content is a big part of McCarthy’s job over the next two years, so expect smoke and mirrors and then yet more smoke. McCarthy will be under pressure to strike a deal whilst not being seen to capitulate too easily. It will be interesting to see if such a balance can be found. As part of his elevation to the Speakership, McCarthy gave House rebels one important concession which was the ability to easily remove him from office. That fringe known as the “House Freedom Caucus” consists of 46 representatives including high-profile figures such as Andy Biggs, Matt Gaetz, Jim Jordan, and Marjorie Taylor, none of whom have a reputation for sitting back and avoiding the media. These are politicians who seem more intent on breaking things rather than putting things together.
What happens, then, when an irresistible force meets an unmovable object? We can be sure the answer in the short term is lots of sound, maybe a little bit of fury, all signifying almost nothing.
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