Biden hosts a big debt ceiling meeting while insisting there's nothing to talk about

W. James Antle III

May 09, 07:00 AM May 09, 07:01 AM

President Joe Biden is set to meet Tuesday with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and other congressional leaders about the debt ceiling standoff, but if you believe the White House, there is nothing to talk about.

“Look, there shouldn't be negotiations on the debt limit,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday. “This is something that they should get to regular order and get to work on. We should not have House Republicans manufacturing a crisis on something that has been done 78 times since 1960.”

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Jean-Pierre pitched the meeting as more of a Biden lecture. “So we're telling them — or saying to them: Do your job,” she said. “Pay for something that you've already spent on. That's it.” The message was similar last week.

“It is the president's job to also be very clear with Congress, with Republicans in Congress: You got to do your job,” Jean-Pierre said. “It is simple.”

“The question is to Speaker McCarthy, as I've said many times before here, is to — to the MAGA Republicans: What is going on here?” she added. “Why can you not get this done? It is simple. It is simple.”

“Let me be very clear: Congress needs to do its job,” budget director Shalanda Young concurred. “Tomorrow, they could put a bill on the floor to make sure we don't default. This is of people's own making.”

“As you know, the president is going to make clear that default has to come off the table, that he is happy to talk about spending priorities and who you value in this country, what our right tax policy is in this country, why every time we have this debate it has to go to working families in this country first in order to do the right thing for this country,” Young also told reporters.

In this telling, McCarthy and other congressional leaders are going to the White House for some coaching, and Biden is Bill Belichick: Do your job. There is no dialogue, only a monologue.

Young mocked this idea even while suggesting it would be Biden’s approach.

“Imagine if this president said, ‘Here's my budget' on March 9. 'If you don't take it all — lock, stock, and barrel, don't change your word, pass it without changes, I'd be willing to cause a recession and cost millions of people their jobs.’ That would be extreme,” she said.

At the same time, Young was saying Biden and his team did not view the only debt ceiling extension to pass a house of Congress, however narrowly, to be the starting point for the talks even though there is a risk of default sometime in June.

On the one hand, Young said Biden is “eager to have a separate conversation about the budget without threatening our economy.” On the other hand, “this is not some abstract debate.” The Biden budget, it seems, is better.

At Monday’s briefing, there were nearly a dozen instances of Jean-Pierre telling Congress to do its job, though some of those comments were referring to passing gun control rather than raising the debt ceiling without spending cuts.

This could all be posturing. In his 36 years in the Senate, Biden threw sharp partisan elbows in public and negotiated in private. He led the debt ceiling talks with House Republicans as vice president under former President Barack Obama, which did result in some spending cuts.

It is possible that Biden’s off-ramp will be an agreement on spending cuts passed through legislation separate from a debt ceiling extension or suspension. The White House invitation itself was a softening of the no-negotiations stance in response to a letter from Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen moving up the day of debt limit reckoning.

“I think that we have to make it clear to the American people that I am prepared to negotiate in detail with their budget,” Biden said in an interview with MSNBC on Friday night. “How much are you going to spend? How much are you going to tax? Where can we cut?”

At the same time, Biden and congressional Republicans are far apart on spending priorities. There is little trust between them that would allow for a quick debt ceiling extension to be followed by budget negotiations.

The White House meeting could also be about establishing blame, as Biden’s team has spent a considerable amount of time arguing that any default, with economic consequences that could prove as dangerous to the president as the GOP, is the fault of House Republicans.

Biden was elected as a legislative deal-maker extraordinaire. But don’t call Tuesday’s bipartisan meeting a negotiation just yet.

Here's how Ron DeSantis plans to attack Trump: Very carefully

W. James Antle III

March 03, 06:00 AM March 03, 06:00 AM

After months of taking slings and arrows from former President Donald Trump, Gov. Ron DeSantis’s (R-FL) counteroffensive strategy is starting to take shape.

DeSantis has largely shrugged off increasingly personal attacks from Trump, who appears to regard the Florida governor’s apparent, yet still unannounced, interest in the 2024 Republican presidential nomination as an act of disloyalty. Trump frequently mentions his 2018 endorsement of DeSantis in the GOP gubernatorial primary.

As DeSantis drops the clearest hints yet that he will be getting into the race, however, subtle attempts to criticize and contrast himself with Trump have become noticeable.

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"I didn’t have a single leak in my administration,” DeSantis told WHD News. “You could have the best vision in the world, make the best decisions as the executive — if you don’t have people that will carry out that and implement it, then it’s not gonna amount to very much."

Whose administration might DeSantis be contrasting himself with?

The Trump White House leaked like a sieve. Officials jockeyed for position and a mercurial president’s favor. Frequent departures led to a high number of disgruntled former employees speaking to the press, sometimes on the record but often anonymously.

Trump also ignored the dictum that personnel is policy, hiring staffers and appointing high-level officials who disagreed with him on the issues. Jared Kushner and daughter Ivanka were, as family members, his closest advisers. They were also essentially Democrats, centrists at best.

The discrepancy between Trump’s foreign policy and that of much of his national security team was illustrated by his appointment of John Bolton at a time when the administration sought to withdraw from Afghanistan and shrink the U.S. military footprint in the Middle East. Aside from DeSantis, the rest of the 2024 Republican presidential field may be dominated by people who worked for Trump, led by former Vice President Mike Pence.

But DeSantis was only complimentary of Trump in the interview.

“His endorsement was the big enchilada,” DeSantis said of winning Trump’s backing for governor, a regular bone of contention at Mar-a-Lago. “Our voters want to look at you, and they size you up, and they take this responsibility very, very seriously.”

DeSantis has also taken a page out of the playbook of an already declared Republican contender, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. He is using attack lines that overtly target President Joe Biden but also apply to Trump. One of the most obvious areas is age, as some Republicans clamor for a generational change in leadership.

“You know, don’t we need some more energy in the executive?” DeSantis told the Times of London. “Don’t we need a little bit more vigor and a little bit more punch?”

“I think people in Florida, I mean, we go very high-octane,” he added. “I bounce around to all corners of this state. And I think people respond to that.”

Biden is 80, DeSantis is 44. But Trump is 76. And this pitch also counterpunches against the Trump branding that helped doom the presidential ambitions of one of DeSantis’s predecessors as Florida governor: “low energy.”

But DeSantis doesn’t say the Trump part out loud. He emphasizes he is most interested in working against the agenda of Biden and the Democrats, not his fellow Republicans.

“Look, I have the responsibility to govern a state, and I’ve got to focus on delivering results,” DeSantis recently told the Washington Examiner. “I’ve also got to protect the people against Biden’s policies, and so when I’m getting in fights, I’m fighting Biden.”

“I think get it done, keep your eye on the ball, and just keep delivering results and fighting back against the Biden administration,” he added.

No direct mention of Trump, only Biden. But who doesn’t keep his eye on the ball, focus on delivering results, and make sure he only fights Biden rather than other Republicans? The former president, who goes after DeSantis by tying him to longtime Republican stalwarts such as Karl Rove, Jeb Bush, and former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI).

A core argument of any DeSantis campaign is that it is possible to have Republican leadership that fights but better picks its battles — political combatants who are unafraid of Democrats and the media but more prudent, disciplined, and effective in hitting back.

Trump’s counterargument is that DeSantis is an imitation of the real thing and a vehicle for the GOP establishment to take back the party from the MAGA base while appropriating his "America First" rhetoric. Trump’s culture war is not your costume.

But that requires Trump to go after Republicans. It may have worked in 2016 against 16 GOP foes, but after a mostly disappointing midterm election, other than DeSantis’s 19-point landslide victory in what is generally considered a battleground state, this tactic might not have aged well.

Don’t expect DeSantis to respond in kind, making his likely campaign expressly anti-Trump. Not even when he is.