How does the White House view the debt ceiling confrontation with McCarthy?

It’s still hard to see the end game, weeks or even months away depending on how quickly a country comes close to default. But the political battle entered a new phase this week when McCarthy He finally floated a legislative proposal in his speech Monday, setting out the spending cuts Republicans wanted in exchange for a one-year increase in the debt ceiling — and giving White House officials something specific to attack.

And they have attack. Biden’s speech Wednesday at Union Hall in Maryland was a summation of his team’s theory on the issue. And White House aides have made it clear they’re eager to keep talking about this, whether through emails from the press store, Description of cabinet officials the specific effects of proposed cuts or in the briefing room platform.

On Friday, press secretary Karen Jean-Pierre called McCarthy’s proposal a “ransom note” and stressed that New VA analysis On the Impact of Proposed GOP Cuts on Veterans Health Care. The White House believes the president’s economic agenda is popular. Repeal laws that helped the middle class and job creation, lower taxes for corporations and the wealthy, and risk default are not.

Republicans, Biden asserted on Wednesday, “They say they’ll default unless I agree with all these clichés they have. A default. It would be worse than being totally irresponsible.”

He reminded McCarthy of the hypocrisy of the Republican Party — they had no problem raising the debt ceiling three times during Trump’s presidency — and of comments by Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump denouncing brinkmanship as reckless. Biden also urged the speaker to “clean up the default, and let’s have a real, serious, detailed conversation about how we can grow the economy, lower costs, and reduce the deficit.”

According to two people familiar with the administration’s strategy, it’s not clear to anyone inside the White House whether McCarthy has votes from his own party to pass his bill, and it may not yet be clear to the speaker himself, who has one. Familiar with the White House’s thinking he called the “principal agent problem.”

The bill will be dead when it reaches the Democratic-controlled Senate. But the White House is clearly signaling to the House GOP moderates: Vote to cut popular programs, including Social Security and Medicare, at your own risk.

“If they get through with this, we’ll hang it around the necks of the moderates,” said one person familiar with the administration’s thinking.

Aides say Biden knew from the Obama administration’s 2011 confrontation with Republicans that it was essential not to allow the debt ceiling to become part of the negotiations. But with McCarthy’s weak spokesmen constantly hanging by a thread, relying largely on his ability to mollify his more radical members, the White House knows that talking him off the edge about the risk of default — giving up what he sees as his main point of leverage — won’t be easy. .

As much as White House officials like the politics of the current phase of negotiations, they know that they will also face pressure to negotiate as they get closer to D-Day.

In fact, the scoring period may be very short with a high risk of default. Economists at Goldman Sachs said this week that due to weaker-than-expected tax season revenues, the US may reach the debt ceiling in early June, earlier than expected. Within the administration, there are some differences in the level of concern, with senior officials who focused on economic matters particularly expressing concern about the serious possibility of default more than others within the purview of politics, according to a senior administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity to speak. free.

Already, some Democrats are urging Biden to deal with McCarthy sooner rather than later. But at this point, Biden is unlikely to say anything different to the speaker in private than he has said publicly — he is open to a bipartisan deal on spending but only after lawmakers authorize a clean increase in the debt ceiling. Having said that, Jean-Pierre Friday would not go so far as to say that Biden would only meet with McCarthy after he cleanly raised the debt ceiling.

There is doubt within the West Wing about whether McCarthy would be willing to meet. Some aides believe it will take increasing pressure from the business community for the speaker to relent, and that, given the difficult politics within his own caucus, he may not be able to back down. In such a scenario, the White House hopes the House of Representatives will, at the very least, swallow a bill passed by the Senate to avoid default, if some Republicans are willing to use a discharge petition to get such a bill off the ground.

But some in the administration are less confident that this scenario will come to fruition than the White House for now on the broad outlines of the argument. “Mitch McConnell is a scary prop,” said the senior administration official.