Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) has agreed to sit down with President Joe Biden after the White House said it would soon host the House speaker for a meeting.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would not specify if the sit-down would focus on the debt ceiling, as McCarthy has requested, in Friday’s press briefing, but the Republican framed the talks that way in a tweet agreeing to the meeting.
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“President Biden: I accept your invitation to sit down and discuss a responsible debt ceiling increase to address irresponsible government spending,” he said Friday. “I look forward to our meeting.”
McCarthy has repeatedly called for the White House to negotiate with Congress on the debt ceiling as the California Republican faces pressure from conservatives to push for substantial spending reforms.
Earlier in the day, Biden indicated he planned to huddle with McCarthy but said they should not “confuse the national debt with debt reduction on a yearly basis.”
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“The debt we’re paying on — and we’re gonna have a little discussion about that with the new majority leader of the House — has accumulated over 200 years, over 200 years, not a joke,” Biden said after meeting with a group of mayors at the White House. “That’s what the national debt is, over $31 trillion, but it’s over 200 years, and one-quarter of that debt — one-quarter of it was accumulated in the four years of my predecessor.”
The United States is expected to reach the debt limit sometime early this summer, raising the risk of a default, and the Treasury Department has already begun to use “extraordinary measures” to give Washington more time to hammer out a deal. McCarthy wants to negotiate spending cuts in exchange for a higher debt ceiling, while the White House has insisted that the borrowing limit be lifted “without conditions.”
