During an interview on Fox News, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) revealed that the Biden administration is still unwilling to negotiate on making spending cuts in the federal budget and that he believes the federal government will end up spending more money next year than this year.
“We took a pause because of the frustration,” McCarthy said of debt ceiling meetings. “This White House will not acknowledge that they are spending too much. I’ve been very clear about where we need to go… The way the process works the House passes a bill, the Senate passes a bill, you go to conference. The Senate never passed anything. The House raised the debt ceiling, but also, put us on a trajectory to actually get our House in order.”
“What all your viewers need to understand what is the debt limit? It’s giving your child a credit card. They charge it all the way up. But year after year after year, all you did was raise the debt limit. So now, you have to pay this credit card but this credit card has more money on it than you make in an entire year. Our debt is larger than our entire economy by an extra 20%. So before we raise that debt limit, shouldn’t we look at ways we can save money, curve what we’re spending? Because we’ve been spending more than we’ve been bringing in for the last 21 years, and so all we’re simply saying is let’s spend less, let’s pullback the COVID money we haven’t spent before, work requirements, help people get jobs, and you know what? Let’s do some permitting reform, cutting the red tape so people can build things in America and I think we could probably find a pretty good agreement to be able to move forward, but the White House will not budge,” McCarthy said.
“I want to be very clear to the White House, and I’ve been very clear from the president, back on February 1st, about what we need to do and he ignored us for 105 days pretty much,” McCarthy added. “Just now are we back in the room, we’ll be back in the room tonight. But it’s very frustrating if they want to come into the room and think we’re going to spend more money next year than the year we did this year. That’s not right and that’s not going to happen.”
McCarthy then reacted to Congressional Democrats calling on President Biden to use the Fourteenth Amendment to raise the debt ceiling.
“Doing the 14th Amendment would not solve any problems,” McCarthy said. “And why would this president go there, instead of doing what everybody else has ever done in government? You work together, you negotiate. But for the last 105 days, he refused to negotiate. He’s not even in the country today. This is part of the problem. It’s just like the border.”
“He ignored the border problem. He knew Title 42 was going to be lifted, and he thought it would just go away. The same problem happened when it came to the debt ceiling. But you know what Republicans in the House did? We — we passed a debt ceiling that actually limits, save, grow. And we did it long before Janet Yellen ever said June 1 was a deadline,” he added. “And we also passed a border security bill that would secure our border before they actually lifted Title 42. You can find solutions if you’re willing to work.”