Republicans hope that by forcing Mr. Biden to negotiate over spending reductions, they can avoid the risk of a catastrophic debt default.
The House G.O.P. passed a bill on Wednesday that raised the debt ceiling while reducing spending and undoing key elements of President Biden’s domestic agenda
Speaker Kevin McCarthy barely passed the bill, which would raise the debt ceiling in exchange for freezing spending at last year’s levels for a decade and rolling back some of Mr. Biden’s health, climate, and tax laws. The legislation also imposes work requirements on social programs and expands mining and fossil fuel production. Republicans admit that their legislation was headed nowhere.
The Democrats in the Senate have threatened to veto the bill, which will die on arrival in the Democratic-led Senate. If Congress does not raise the debt limit, which is projected to be reached as early as this summer, the U.S. government faces a potentially catastrophic default. Republicans viewed the vote as a crucial step to strengthen their negotiating position against Mr. Joe Biden.
Mr. McCarthy struggled to unite his fractious conference to pass any fiscal outline at all. It was unclear until the last votes were counted whether he could gather enough votes to pass the bill, but party leaders managed to keep their conference largely united after days of arm-twisting and cajoling. Nevertheless, Mr. McCarthy cast the bill as a way to bolster the party ahead of a showdown with the president. Along with last-minute changes to the legislation he made to placate Midwestern Republicans and the far right, he was able to win the votes of some lawmakers who have routinely voted against raising the statutory borrowing limit.
Republicans have been trying and failing for months to unite around a budget blueprint outlining specific, detailed spending cuts they would demand in exchange for raising the borrowing limit. In a sign of the pessimistic outlook for a budget plan materializing, internal backbiting bubbled up last month after Mr. McCarthy privately derided the efforts of his deputies.
House G.O.P. leaders unveiled the Limit, Save, Grow Act, a substantially watered-down plan that dropped the party’s aspirations for balancing the budget and imposing draconian cuts
Republican leaders received political cover from an unusual wing – influential conservatives, including Representative Chip Roy of Texas, who stood on Wednesday in a closed-door meeting of lawmakers to urge his colleagues to vote for the bill.
Democrats assailed the measure as a cruel proposal that would hit the poor hardest. They say it would cut funding for important programs that the most vulnerable in society depend on. In response, Mr. Biden repeated that he would not bargain over lifting the debt limit. He said that he would meet with Mr. McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended. He reiterated that it is not negotiable.
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