Biden to meet McCarthy on Monday as debt ceiling deadline nears
Global News
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will meet in person on Monday as the government races against a looming deadline to raise America's debt limit.
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will meet in person on Monday as the government races against a looming deadline to raise America’s debt limit before federal funds potentially run dry early next month.
The leaders spoke by phone Sunday as the president returned home on Air Force One after the Group of Seven summit in Japan. McCarthy, R-Calif., told reporters at the Capitol that the call was “productive” and that the on-again, off-again negotiations would resume later in the day.
Both sides have said progress was being made but that they remain far apart. Biden’s Treasury Department has said it could run out of cash as soon as June 1, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said Sunday, “I think that that’s a hard deadline.”
McCarthy said after his call with Biden that “I think we can solve some of these problems if he understands what we’re looking at.” The speaker added, “But I’ve been very clear to him from the very beginning. We have to spend less money than we spent last year.”
The Republican leader said “there’s no agreement on anything” and that ”we’ve all said our piece about where we are and we’re trying to find common ground to get this done.”
Their conversation followed an exchange of harsh rhetoric reflecting the high stakes of the standoff.
Biden said at a news conference in Hiroshima that House Republicans must move off their “extreme positions” on the now-stalled talks over raising the debt limit and that there would be no agreement to avert a catastrophic default only on their terms.
McCarthy said that based on earlier discussions, “I felt that we were at a place where we could agree together that we would have compromise,.” Now, he said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” “the president, even though he was overseas, thought to change places.”
