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“Republicans, Biden asserted Wednesday, “say they’re going to default unless I agree to all these wacko notions they have. Default. It would be worse than totally irresponsible.”
He reminded McCarthy of the GOP’s hypocrisy — they had no problem raising the debt ceiling three times during the Trump presidency — and of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump’s own comments decrying debt limit brinkmanship as reckless. Biden also urged the speaker to “take default off the table, and let’s have a real, serious, detailed conversation about how to 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 if McCarthy has the votes from his own caucus to pass his bill, and it may not yet be clear to the speaker himself, who has what one person familiar with the White House’s thinking termed a “principal-agent problem.”

The bill would be dead on arrival in a Democrat-controlled Senate. But the White House is signaling clearly to GOP moderates in the House: Vote to cut popular programs, including Social Security and Medicare, at your own risk.

“If they pass this, we are going to hang it around their moderates’ necks,” said one person familiar with the administration’s thinking.”

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“Biden, his aides say, learned from the Obama administration’s 2011 standoff with Republicans that it’s imperative not to allow the debt ceiling to become part of negotiations. But with McCarthy’s tenuous speakership constantly hanging by a thread, and dependent in large part on his ability to placate his most extreme members, the White House knows that talking him off the ledge on risking default — giving up what he sees as his main point of leverage — won’t be easy.

And as much as White House officials like the politics of the negotiations’ current phase, they know they, too, will face pressure to negotiate the closer they get to D-Day.”