House Dems call on Biden to meet with McCarthy on debt limit

President Joe Biden immediately rejected Kevin McCarthy's opening debt-limit proposal, but it prompted movement elsewhere: A growing number of House Democrats want party leaders to restart negotiations.

The party is still firmly behind Biden and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who declared the speaker's pitch dead on arrival in the upper chamber, in the position that Congress should raise the debt ceiling without any conditions. But a growing contingent of Democrats are acknowledging that Biden's blanket refusal to engage with McCarthy may need to change — especially if House Republicans manage to pass their bill as planned next week.

Should McCarthy accomplish that step, several House Democrats said this week that Biden would need to meet with the speaker. Not doing so, they worry, could make it appear to voters that the White House isn't working with requisite urgency on an issue with potentially drastic economic consequences.

“They’ve got to do it soon,” Rep. Debbie Dingell (D-Mich.), a close White House ally, said of a Biden-McCarthy sitdown, adding that while she believes there will ultimately be a clean debt-ceiling increase, the administration “can’t keep waiting.”

Democratic lawmakers have already pressed that point in private, according to two people close to the discussions, urging the White House to lay out plans to meet with McCarthy for fear that public opinion would turn against the party. And swing-seat lawmakers stressed there's no harm in starting a conversation, even as they all oppose McCarthy's opening bid.

“I don't think there's any harm in the two of them sitting down to talk,” said first-term Rep. Greg Landsman (D-Ohio). “The idea that we're even coming this close to a potential default is insane.”

Over in the Senate, centrist Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) has been pushing Biden for weeks to restart talks. Manchin said in a statement Thursday he didn’t fully agree with McCarthy’s proposal but slammed Biden’s refusal to meet with the Republican leader as a “deficiency of leadership.”

Rank-and-file House Democrats aren't going that far.

“This is not a serious piece of legislation,” said Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.). “That being said, I am happy we are talking about the debt ceiling, because I think it's very critical to talk, and so do I think the speaker of the House and the president should sit down and talk about the debt ceiling? Of course they should.”

Democratic leaders aren’t budging, yet. They remain in lockstep with the White House’s position that talks can’t begin until House Republicans release their own budget and fully divorce the conversation about debt from spending. Biden and McCarthy last met on the debt ceiling at the White House in early February, and while both characterized it as a promising start, the meeting didn’t produce any breakthroughs. Democratic leaders believe they should maintain maximum pressure on Republicans rather than strengthen McCarthy’s hand heading into a difficult vote for the GOP conference.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told reporters Thursday he didn’t expect any Democrats to support McCarthy’s offer and reiterated that they could talk with Republicans once they produced a budget. “I don’t know whether reasonable people would conclude that we should be negotiating against ourselves. That’s not a logical place to be,” he said.

Biden allies are also salivating over the political contrast they believe the GOP’s debt plan creates, allowing Democrats to position themselves as the bulwark against proposals that would roll back clean energy tax credits and impose work requirements on Medicaid beneficiaries.

“Ask House Republicans: Do they support Speaker McCarthy’s plan to kill manufacturing jobs in their home districts?” read the headline of a White House memo Thursday detailing more than a half-dozen Republican members whose districts are benefiting from manufacturing projects supported by the Inflation Reduction Act’s tax credits.

In a speech Wednesday, Biden rejected McCarthy’s proposal as full of “wacko notions” and reiterated his demand for a clean debt ceiling increase.

Yet while he’s maintained for months that he wants McCarthy to put out a budget before meeting with him again, officials have refrained from saying definitively whether the GOP passing its debt-limit bill would shift that calculus.

“If you do another meeting, there’ll be an expectation of negotiations,” one adviser close to the White House, granted anonymity to speak candidly, said of the dilemma facing Biden and his top aides. “The White House would have to be able to structure the lead up to the meetings to say, we’re happy to talk to him but we’re not negotiating. … And then the question becomes: 'What’s the meeting for?'”

On Thursday, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declined to specify whether Biden would meet with McCarthy and under what conditions, saying only that “we’re going to analyze what’s put forward to us, and we’ll have more to share.”

A bipartisan group of lawmakers from the Problem Solvers Caucus endorsed a separate debt framework Wednesday to hike the debt limit without drastic spending cuts. They're billing it as a potential path to a compromise.

“Probably everyone's rooting for the speaker and the president to come to a deal,” said Rep. Scott Peters (D-Calif.), a member of the bipartisan group. He said he wasn’t going to dictate what the president and speaker should do, but added: “I think more discussion or exploration about where people are, what would work, is helpful — and that's why we did what we did.”

Democratic leaders haven’t openly embraced the bipartisan bid, though Jeffries said Thursday he saw it as proof that there are several dozen Republican lawmakers “who disagree with the extreme Republican proposal."

Still, others projected optimism that a sit-down between Biden and McCarthy could produce a bipartisan breakthrough.

“They’re both Irish-American. They ought to have a nice dinner, and they ought to get to work and get it done for the sake of the country,” said Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-Ohio), who represents a district former President Donald Trump won in 2020.