May 19 (UPI) — Debt-ceiling negotiations came to a halt Friday as Republican lawmakers walked out of a meeting with White House officials.
Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy has continued to call for vast spending cuts to domestic programs, and said that the White House was not willing to agree to them.
“We’ve got to get movement by the White House, and we don’t have any movement yet. So, yeah, we’ve gotta pause,” McCarthy said, according to The Hill. “Yesterday I really felt we were at the location where I could see the path. The White House is just — look, we can’t be spending more money next year. We have to spend less than we spent the year before. It’s pretty easy.”
The White House had expressed optimism on Thursday that “steady progress” was being made in talks between President Joe Biden‘s administration and Republican negotiators over a budget framework and an agreement to raise to the debt ceiling.
The announcement was made as the June debt-limit deadline approaches and as the president is in Japan for the G7 summit gathering of world leaders.
“The president directed this team to continue pressing forward for a bipartisan agreement and made clear the need to protect essential programs for hardworking Americans and the economic progress of the past two years as negotiations head into advanced stages,” the Biden administration statement said.
The statement added that Biden “remains confident that Congress will take necessary action to avoid default.”
The Biden administration and McCarthy have been feuding for months over raising the $31.4 trillion debt ceiling ahead of its June deadline.
The GOP have sought to use their majority in the House to push back against Democratic spending, an issue that they have tied to raising the United States’ debt, while the president and his Democratic Party have been steadfast that the debt ceiling must be raised without conditions to make sure the country’s bills are paid.
Congress has raised the debt ceiling 78 times since 1960, the majority during Republican presidencies including three times during the previous Trump administration.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned that if Congress allows the United States to default on its financial responsibility, the consequences would be “an economic and financial catastrophe,” for both the domestic and international markets.
The announcement by the White House came after McCarthy told reporters Thursday morning that he also sees progress being made on a deal to raise the debt ceiling.
“We’re not there. We haven’t agreed to anything yet. But I see the path that we could come through,” he said, adding that it would be “important to try to have the agreement, especially in principle, by sometime this weekend.”
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce told Biden in a letter Friday that raising the debt limit through the 14th amendment would be as disastrous as a default. They argued that the President does not have the constitutional authority to enact such a move.
“Simply put, there is no alternative to reaching a bipartisan agreement to raise the statutory debt limit,” the letter said.