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      Special Counsel Who Hunted for a Deep-State Conspiracy Presents Muted Findings

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      John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel, criticized the F.B.I. during a six-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee.John H. Durham, the Trump-era special counsel who for four years pursued a politically fraught investigation into the Russia inquiry, told lawmakers on Wednesday that F.B.I. officials had exhibited confirmation bias — even as he defended his work against Democratic accusations that he became a partisan tool.In a nearly six-hour hearing before the House Judiciary Committee, Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he did not want to go beyond his report. That approach echoed an appearance in 2019 before the same committee by Robert S. Mueller III, the special counsel overseeing the investigation into possible ties between Russia and the Trump campaign.The hearing may be the final — official, at least — chapter in the complex saga of the Russia investigation and former President Donald J. Trump’s repeated efforts to reframe it as a deep-state plot, which has been a source of turbulence in American political life for more than six years. Mr. Durham retired after completing his report last month, and Senate Democrats have not invited him to testify.For years, Mr. Trump and his allies stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would find a conspiracy lurking in the origins of the Russia investigation and would prosecute high-level officials. But Mr. Durham developed only two peripheral cases, both of which ended in acquittals, while citing flaws in the F.B.I.’s early investigative steps he attributed to confirmation bias.“There were identified, documented, significant failures of a highly sensitive, unique investigation that was undertaken by the F.B.I.,” Mr. Durham said. “The investigation clearly reveals that decisions that were made were made in one direction. If there was something that was inconsistent with the notion that Trump was involved in a well-coordinated conspiracy with the Russians, that information was largely discarded or ignored.”The hearing was largely a predicable display of partisanship, with each party trading claims about the merits of the underlying investigation into Russia’s attempt to manipulate the 2016 election in Mr. Trump’s favor. Mr. Mueller documented myriad links between Russia and Trump campaign officials, but did not charge any Trump associate with a criminal conspiracy with Russia.Republicans railed against the Russia investigation as unjustified and portrayed it as politically motivated and corrupt, focusing on flawed wiretap applications and text messages in which F.B.I. officials expressed animus toward Mr. Trump.Democrats defended it as legitimate and necessary by turning to the substance of Mr. Mueller’s work. Not only did he indict numerous Russians — and win convictions of multiple Trump associates on other crimes — but he also uncovered how the Trump campaign’s chairman had shared internal polling and strategy with a Russian and Ukrainian political consultant the government says is a Russian intelligence agent, among other things.For large portions of the hearing, Mr. Durham served as a foil for both purposes, as lawmakers on each side asked questions intended to affirm whatever facts or claims they wanted to emphasize.President Donald J. Trump, Attorney General William P. Barr and their allies in Congress stoked expectations that Mr. Durham would find a “deep state” conspiracy.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesMuch of his own critique of the investigation was familiar territory. The most factually grounded portions — especially errors and omissions in a set of wiretap applications that relied in part on claims in the so-called Steele dossier, a dubious compendium of what turned out to be opposition research indirectly funded by the Clinton campaign — echoed a December 2019 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general. Mr. Durham repeated those findings, but offered no concrete new suggestions for reforms.Other parts were more ephemeral. After Mr. Durham’s initial effort to find intelligence abuses at the heart of the Russia investigation came up empty, he shifted to hunting for a basis to blame the Clinton campaign. He used court filings and his report to insinuate that the campaign set out to defraud the F.B.I. and frame Mr. Trump, although he never charged any such conspiracy. Some Republicans, however, treated that idea as established fact.“What role did the Clinton campaign play in this hoax?” asked Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, adding, “Exactly what was the ‘Clinton Plan?’”But some of Mr. Trump’s staunchest supporters expressed disappointment that Mr. Durham did not live up to the grander expectations that he would put high-level officials in prison and prove a deep-state conspiracy.For example, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, insisted that suspicions about collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia emerged because of an operation by Western intelligence agencies — a conspiracy theory that Mr. Durham set out to prove but failed to find evidence to support. Mr. Gaetz said Mr. Durham had let the country down, and compared the special counsel’s inquiry to the Washington Generals, the basketball team whose job is to lose in exhibition games against the Harlem Globetrotters.“When you are part of the cover-up, Mr. Durham, then it makes our job harder,” Mr. Gaetz said.Mr. Durham replied that Mr. Gaetz’s comments were “offensive.”Representative Matt Gaetz suggested that Mr. Durham was part of a cover-up.Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesBut while most of the Republicans on the committee gave Mr. Durham a warmer welcome, he did not always say things that supported their position. Mr. Durham called Mr. Mueller a “patriot” and did not contradict any of his findings. He said that Russia did interfere in the 2016 election — and characterized that intelligence operation as a “significant threat.”Pushed by Representative Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, to go beyond his report’s conclusion that F.B.I. agents had acted with “confirmation bias” and accuse them in his testimony of having taken steps motivated by political favoritism, Mr. Durham demurred, saying that “it’s difficult to get into somebody else’s head.”And he said that the F.B.I. had “an affirmative duty” to open some kind of investigation into the allegation that served as the Russia investigation’s basis — an Australian diplomat said that a Trump campaign adviser had made a comment suggesting that the campaign had advance knowledge that Russia would anonymously dump out hacked Democratic emails.Still, he also testified that “in my view,” that information did not amount to “a legitimate basis to open as a full investigation” and that the bureau ought to have opened it as a lower-tier inquiry, like an “assessment” or a “preliminary” investigation. That went slightly beyond his report, which had argued that opening the inquiry at a lower level would have been better.The Justice Department’s inspector general, Michael E. Horowitz, concluded in 2019 that the same information was a sufficient basis to open a “full” counterintelligence inquiry.Throughout the hearing, Democrats pressed Mr. Durham to acknowledge or explain certain findings from a New York Times article in January examining how his inquiry became roiled by internal dissent and ethical disputes.Mr. Durham rarely offered new information, repeatedly saying he did not want to go beyond his report. Haiyun Jiang for The New York TimesThey asked him, for example, why his longtime deputy, Nora R. Dannehy, resigned from his team in September 2020. The Times reported that she did so in protest after disputes over prosecutorial ethics, including the drafting of a potential interim report before the 2020 election.Mr. Durham spoke highly of Ms. Dannehy but declined to say why she had resigned. He called the Times article “unsourced” but did not deny its findings, adding, “To the extent The New York Times wrote an article suggesting certain things, it is what it is.”Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California, asked Mr. Durham whether it was true, as the Times also reported, that when he and Attorney General William P. Barr traveled to Italy to pursue a certain pro-Trump conspiracy theory, Italian officials denied it but passed on a tip about unrelated financial crimes linked to Mr. Trump.Mr. Barr decided the allegation, whose details remain unclear, was too serious to ignore but had Mr. Durham control an investigation into it, and he filed no charges, The Times reported.“The question’s outside the scope of what I think I’m authorized to talk about — it’s not part of the report,” Mr. Durham replied, but added: “I can tell you this. That investigative steps were taken, grand jury subpoenas were issued and it came to nothing.” More

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      House Kills Effort to Censure Adam Schiff, Aided by Some Republicans

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      The NewsThe House turned back a Republican effort on Wednesday to formally censure Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, for his role in investigating and impeaching former President Donald J. Trump.The vote was 225 to 196 to table, or kill, a resolution by Representative Anna Paulina Luna, a Florida Republican who has allied herself closely with the former president. Twenty Republicans joined Democrats in voting to sideline it, with another two G.O.P. lawmakers voting “present” to avoid registering a position. In a surprise, five Democrats also voted “present.”The measure would have rebuked Mr. Schiff, who as chairman of the House Intelligence Committee investigated whether Mr. Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and prosecuted Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial. It called for an ethics investigation into Mr. Schiff and a $16 million fine if he was found to have lied.Representative Adam B. Schiff, Democrat of California, investigated whether former President Donald J. Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and prosecuted Mr. Trump at his first impeachment trial.Haiyun Jiang/The New York TimesWhy It MattersThe censure resolution, coming a day after Mr. Trump was arraigned in a federal court on 37 criminal counts related to his mishandling of classified documents and efforts to obstruct federal investigators, was the latest bid by Republicans to retaliate against Democrats for their treatment of the former president.But while the measure, which accused Mr. Schiff of willfully lying for political gain, was highly partisan, it raised complicated questions about accountability and revenge. Mr. Schiff’s claims that there was “ample evidence” that Mr. Trump colluded with Russia were undermined by the conclusions of the special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, who wrote in his report that his investigation “did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” Republicans have wielded that determination to accuse Mr. Schiff of lying.“Ultimately, this is an accountability tool that we can do to each other to ensure that the integrity of the institution is intact,” Ms. Luna said.Still, Mr. Schiff’s statements and allegations were made during an official investigation of Mr. Trump. On Wednesday, Mr. Schiff called the effort to censure him “political payback” and warned that it would set “a dangerous precedent of going after someone who held a corrupt president accountable.”The bipartisan vote to table the measure suggested that at least some Republicans agreed that it was inappropriate.BackgroundMr. Schiff, who is running in a competitive primary for the chance to succeed a fellow California Democrat, Senator Dianne Feinstein, has long been vilified by the G.O.P. Earlier this year, Speaker Kevin McCarthy unilaterally removed him from the Intelligence Committee.Ms. Luna, who first filed a resolution to fine and censure Mr. Schiff, rewrote her measure to say that the House Ethics Committee should impose the $16 million penalty if it determined that Mr. Schiff had “lied, made misrepresentations and abused sensitive information.” The move was geared toward allaying concerns about the resolution among Republicans, but it did not appear to have succeeded.“The Constitution says the House may make its own rules but we can’t violate other (later) provisions of the Constitution,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote on Twitter, arguing that the resolution violated amendments governing excessive fines and changes to congressional pay.What’s NextMr. Schiff has been using the censure resolution to raise funds for his Senate campaign, beseeching supporters to chip in money to help him cover a fine that has little chance of being levied.It was unclear whether Ms. Luna’s effort was the start of a trend. This month, Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, filed a resolution to censure Representative Bennie Thompson, Democrat of Mississippi, accusing him of improperly sharing records with the Biden administration while running the committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, and the events leading up to it. More

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      Republican hardliners’ revolt against Kevin McCarthy shuts down US House of Representatives

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      The US House of Representatives has been forced to postpone all votes until next week – paralyzed by a revolt against its Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, by ultra-conservative members of his own party.The standoff between McCarthy and a hardline faction of his own Republican majority has forced the chamber into a holding pattern that looks likely to persist until at least Monday.Members of the House Freedom Caucus have been upset over the bipartisan debt ceiling bill that McCarthy recently brokered with the Democratic president, Joe Biden, as well as claims that some hardliners had been threatened over their opposition to the deal.“You’ve got a small group of people who are pissed off that are keeping the House of Representatives from functioning,” said Republican representative Steve Womack.“This is insane. This is not the way a governing majority is expected to behave, and frankly, I think there will be a political cost to it.”The hardliners were among the 71 Republicans who opposed debt ceiling legislation that passed the House last week. They say McCarthy did not cut spending deeply enough and retaliated against at least one of their members. McCarthy and other House Republican leaders dismissed the retaliation claims.They also accuse McCarthy of violating the terms of an agreement that allowed him to secure the speaker’s gavel in January, though it was not clear which aspects they believe were not honored.House action came to a sudden halt midday on Tuesday when the band of conservatives refused to support a routine procedural vote to set the rules schedule for the day’s debate. It was the first time in some 20 years a routine rules vote was defeated.Days of closed-door negotiations have not yielded a resolution, but McCarthy said he was confident they would sort out their differences. “We’re going to come back on Monday, work through it and be back up for the American public.”McCarthy oversees a narrow House Republican majority of 222-213, meaning that he can lose only four votes from his own party on any measure that faces uniform opposition from Democrats.Along with an attempt by Republicans to pass a bill preventing the banning of gas stoves, the dispute also has delayed bills that would increase congressional scrutiny of regulations and expand the scope of judicial review of federal agencies.As a result of the revolt against McCarthy, routine votes could not be taken, and the pair of pro-gas stove bills important to GOP activists stalled out. Some lawmakers asked if they could simply go home.McCarthy brushed off the disruption as healthy political debate, part of his “risk taker” way of being a leader — not too different, he said, from the 15-vote spectacle it took in January for him to finally convince his colleagues to elect him as speaker. With a paper-thin GOP majority, any few Republicans have outsized sway.But the aftermath of the debt ceiling deal is coming into focus. The McCarthy-Biden compromise set overall federal budget caps — holding spending flat for 2024, and with a 1% growth for 2025 — and Congress still needs to pass appropriations bills to fund the various federal agencies at the agreed-to amounts. That is typically done by 1 October. After Biden signed the debt deal into law last weekend, lawmakers have been fast at work on the agency-spending bills ahead of votes this summer to meet the deadline.Not only did the conservatives object to the deal with Biden as insufficient, they claim it violated the terms of an agreement they had reached with McCarthy to roll back spending even further, to 2022 levels, to make him speaker.“There was an agreement in January,” Ken Buck, a Republican representative from Colorado, told reporters after he left the speaker’s office on Wednesday morning. “And it was violated in the debt-ceiling bill.”If Congress fails to pass the spending bills by fall it risks a federal government shutdown – an outcome conservatives have forced multiple times before, starting in the Clinton era when then-Speaker Newt Gingrich led the House into a budget standoff, and again in 2013 when conservatives shut down the government as they tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act.The longest federal shutdown in history was during the Trump era when Congress refused his demands for money to build the border wall between the US and Mexico.With Reuters and the Associated Press More

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      Can Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden Fix Washington?

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      Among the various reassessments of Kevin McCarthy following his successful debt ceiling negotiations, the one with the widest implications belongs to Matthew Continetti, who writes in The Washington Free Beacon that “McCarthy’s superpower is his desire to be speaker. He likes and wants his job.”If you hadn’t followed American politics across the last few decades, this would seem like a peculiar statement: What kind of House speaker wouldn’t want the job?But part of what’s gone wrong with American institutions lately is the failure of important figures to regard their positions as ends unto themselves. Congress, especially, has been overtaken by what Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute describes as a “platform” mentality, where ambitious House members and senators treat their offices as places to stand and be seen — as talking heads, movement leaders, future presidents — rather than as roles to inhabit and opportunities to serve.On the Republican side, this tendency has taken several forms, from Newt Gingrich’s yearning to be a Great Man of History, to Ted Cruz’s ambitious grandstanding in the Obama years, to the emergence of Trump-era performance artists like Marjorie Taylor Greene. And the party’s congressional institutionalists, from dealmakers like John Boehner to policy mavens like Paul Ryan, have often been miserable-seeming prisoners of the talking heads, celebrity brands and would-be presidents.This dynamic seemed likely to imprison McCarthy as well, but he’s found a different way of dealing with it: He’s invited some of the bomb throwers into the legislative process, trying to turn them from platform-seekers into legislators by giving them a stake in governance, and so far he’s been rewarded with crucial support from figures like Greene and Thomas Massie, the quirky Kentucky libertarian. And it’s clear that part of what makes this possible is McCarthy’s enthusiasm for the actual vote-counting, handholding work required of his position, and his lack of both Gingrichian egomania and get-me-out-of-here impatience.But McCarthy isn’t operating in a vacuum. The Biden era has been good for institutionalism generally, because the president himself seems to understand and appreciate the nature of his office more than Barack Obama ever did. As my colleague Carlos Lozada noted on our podcast this week, in both the Senate and the White House, Obama was filled with palpable impatience at all the limitations on his actions. This showed up constantly in his negotiation strategy, where he had a tendency to use his own office as a pundit’s platform, lecturing the G.O.P. on what they should support and thereby alienating Republicans from compromise in advance.Whereas Biden, who actually liked being a senator, is clearly comfortable with quiet negotiation on any reasonable grounds, which is crucial to keeping the other side invested in a deal. And he’s comfortable, as well, with letting the spin machine run on both sides of the aisle, rather than constantly imposing his own rhetorical narrative on whatever bargain Republicans might strike.The other crucial element in the healthier environment is the absence of what Cruz brought to the debt-ceiling negotiations under Obama — the kind of sweeping maximalism, designed to build a presidential brand, that turns normal horse-trading into an existential fight.Expectating that kind of maximalism from Republicans, some liberals kept urging intransigence on Biden long after it became clear that what McCarthy wanted was more in line with previous debt-ceiling bargains. But McCarthy’s reasonability was sustainable because of the absence of a leading Republican senator playing Cruz’s absolutist part. Instead, the most notable populist Republican elected in 2022, J.D. Vance, has been busy looking for deals with populist Democrats on issues like railroad safety and bank-executive compensation, or adding a constructive amendment to the debt-ceiling bill even though he voted against it — as though he, no less than McCarthy, actually likes and wants his current job.One reason for the diminishment of Cruz-like grandstanders is the continued presence of Donald Trump as the G.O.P.’s personality-in-chief, to whose eminence no senator can reasonably aspire. At least through 2024, it’s clear the only way that Trump might be unseated is through the counterprogramming offered by Ron DeSantis, who is selling himself — we’ll see with what success — as the candidate of governance and competence; no bigger celebrity or demagogue is walking through that door.So for now there’s more benefit to legislative normalcy for ambitious Republicans, and less temptation toward the platform mentality, than there would be if Trump’s part were open for the taking.Whatever happens, it will be years until that role comes open. In which case Kevin McCarthy could be happy in his job for much longer than might have been expected by anyone watching his tortuous ascent.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTOpinion) and Instagram. More

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      US debt ceiling deal narrowly passes senate averting catastrophic federal default

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      The Senate narrowly passed a bill to suspend the debt ceiling on Thursday night, sending the legislation to Joe Biden’s desk and averting a federal default that could have wreaked havoc on the US economy and global markets.The final vote was 63 to 36, with 46 Democrats and 17 Republicans supporting the bill while five Democrats and 31 Republicans opposed the legislation. Sixty votes were needed to pass the bill.“Tonight’s vote is a good outcome because Democrats did a very good job taking the worst parts of the Republican plan off the table,” the Senate majority leader, Democrat Chuck Schumer, said after the vote. “And that’s why Dems voted overwhelmingly for this bill, while Republicans certainly in the Senate did not.”Biden applauded the Senate’s accomplishment and promised to sign the bill as soon as it reaches his desk, with just days to go before the 5 June default deadline.“Tonight, senators from both parties voted to protect the hard-earned economic progress we have made and prevent a first-ever default by the United States,” Biden said in a statement. “Our work is far from finished, but this agreement is a critical step forward, and a reminder of what’s possible when we act in the best interests of our country.”The Senate vote came one day after the House passed the debt ceiling bill in a resounding, bipartisan vote of 314 to 117. The bill – which was negotiated between Biden and the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy of California – will suspend the government’s borrowing limit until January 2025, ensuring the issue will not resurface before the next presidential election.The final Senate vote on the bill capped off a long day in the upper chamber, where lawmakers spent hours considering amendments to the legislation. All 11 of the proposed amendments failed to gain enough support to be added to the underlying bill.Several of the amendments were introduced by Senate Republicans who expressed concern that the debt ceiling bill passed by the House did too little to rein in government spending.As part of the negotiations over the bill, McCarthy successfully pushed for modest government spending cuts and changes to the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families Programs. Those changes were deemed insufficient by 31 Republican senators, who echoed the criticism voiced by the 71 House Republicans who opposed the bill a day earlier.“It doesn’t go far enough. It doesn’t do the basic things that it purports to do,” Senator Mike Lee, a Republican of Utah, told Fox News on Thursday morning. “In case after case, the cuts that it proposes won’t materialize.”The Senate minority leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, supported the bill, even as he acknowledged that lawmakers must take further action to tackle the federal government’s debt of more than $31tn.“The Fiscal Responsibility Act avoids the catastrophic consequences of a default on our nation’s debt,” McConnell said on the floor on Thursday morning. “The deal the House passed last night is a promising step toward fiscal sanity. But make no mistake: there is much more work to be done. The fight to reel in wasteful government spending is far from over.”As some of their colleagues lamented the state of America’s debt, defense hawks in the Senate Republican conference warned that the legislation does not sufficiently fund the Pentagon, leaving the US military vulnerable in the face of foreign threats.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSchumer and McConnell attempted to allay those concerns by entering a statement into the record reaffirming that America stands ready to “respond to ongoing and growing national security threats”.“This debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia and our other adversaries,” the joint statement read. “The Senate is not about to ignore our national needs, nor abandon our friends and allies who face urgent threats from America’s most dangerous adversaries.”The Senate leaders released a second statement aimed at reassuring colleagues who expressed alarm over a provision stipulating that an across-the-board spending cut will be enacted if Congress does not pass all 12 appropriations bills for fiscal year 2024. The measure was designed to incentivize Congress members to pass a full budget, which has proven to be a difficult task in recent years, but lawmakers fear the policy will lead to more spending cuts.“We share the concern of many of our colleagues about the potential impact of sequestration and we will work in a bipartisan, collaborative way to avoid this outcome,” Schumer and McConnell said. “The leaders look forward to bills being reported out of committee with strong bipartisan support.”Senate Democrats also lobbied against certain provisions in the bill, namely the expedited approval of the controversial Mountain Valley natural gas pipeline. Senator Tim Kaine, a Democrat of Virginia, introduced an amendment to remove the pipeline provision from the underlying debt ceiling bill, but that measure failed alongside the 10 other proposed amendments.Despite their personal concerns about the details of the bill, most Senate Democrats, including Kaine, supported the legislation to get it to Biden’s desk and avoid a devastating default that economists warned could result in millions of lost jobs. With the immediate crisis averted, Democrats reiterated their demands to eliminate the debt ceiling and remove any future threat of default.“The fact remains that the House majority never should have put us at risk of a disastrous, self-inflicted default in the first place,” said Senator Chris Coons, a Democrat. “We should prevent the debt ceiling from being used as a political hostage and stop allowing our country to be taken up to the edge of default.” More

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      Debt ceiling bill: key takeaways from the vote

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      The US House of Representatives passed the much-debated debt ceiling bill on Wednesday evening, moving the country closer to avoiding a potentially catastrophic default. Next up in line is the Senate, the Democrat majority chamber, which would push the bill to Joe Biden’s desk.But the vote on Wednesday revealed the divided lines, not only between Republicans and Democrats, but within the parties. Here are some key takeaways from this vote on the Fiscal Responsibility Act:Kevin McCarthy’s party faced significant internal resistanceMore Democrats (165) than Republicans (149) supported the measure – something the right wing may use as evidence that the bill was a bad deal for their side. Indeed, the Republican opposition to the bill is much louder than that of progressive Democrats, who are concerned about the cuts to benefits programs and the impact on climate.Key Democratic programs and priorities will feel the effectsAn estimated 750,000 could lose food stamp benefits due to the new work requirements, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a progressive thinktank. And in another blow to progressives, the bill gives special treatment to the Mountain Valley pipeline.A quarter of the $80bn of newly allotted funding to refurbish the IRS will also be cut from Biden’s key legislation, the Inflation Reduction ActBut it preserves health plans, Social Security and other programsThe bill will not impact Medicaid benefits, the main government health program for low income Americans, or social security, even though McCarthy tried to keep the debate open on such programs just hours ahead of Wednesday’s vote. Republicans attempted to cut these plans to curb government spending. However the bill will avoid more increases to the bloated US defense budget.And the agreement will fully fund medical care for veterans at the levels included in Biden’s proposed 2024 budget blueprint.Both Biden and McCarthy are counting this as a winWhile critics say the president could have avoided making multiple concessions, the president touted his ability to bring the deal together under heated circumstances, and the bipartisanship he has famously campaigned on.“This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise,” the president said in a statement reacting to the news. “Neither side got everything it wanted. That’s the responsibility of governing. I want to thank speaker McCarthy and his team for negotiating in good faith, as well as leader Jeffries for his leadership. This agreement is good news for the American people and the American economy.”McCarthy, meanwhile, claimed the bill would herald the “largest savings in American history” during the floor debate, though this is not quite accurate.“I have been thinking about this day before my vote for speaker because I knew the debt ceiling was coming. And I wanted to make history. I wanted to do something no other Congress has done,” McCarthy told reporters after the vote. “Tonight, we all made history.”The Senate is already making moves to move the bill forwardChuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader has already put the debt limit bill on the Senate calendar to start the process on Thursday. There is likely to be some resistance there as well, as progressives such as Bernie Sanders have already signaled their concerns, but the bill is expected to pass. More

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      US House passes bill to raise debt ceiling just days before default

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      The House passed a bill to raise the debt ceiling on Wednesday, clearing a major legislative hurdle with just days left before the US is expected to default.The final House vote was 314 to 117, with 149 Republicans and 165 Democrats supporting the measure. In a potentially worrisome sign for the House Republican speaker, Kevin McCarthy, 71 members of his conference opposed the deal that he brokered with President Joe Biden.Taking a victory lap after the bill’s passage, McCarthy downplayed concerns over divisions within the House Republican conference and celebrated the policy concessions he secured in his negotiations with Biden.“I have been thinking about this day before my vote for speaker because I knew the debt ceiling was coming. And I wanted to make history. I wanted to do something no other Congress has done,” McCarthy told reporters after the vote. “Tonight, we all made history.”Biden applauded the House passage of the legislation, calling on the Senate to quickly take up the legislation to avoid a default. The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has warned that the federal government will be unable to pay its bills starting 5 June unless the debt ceiling is raised.“This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise. Neither side got everything it wanted,” Biden said in a statement. “I have been clear that the only path forward is a bipartisan compromise that can earn the support of both parties. This agreement meets that test.”The debt ceiling bill passed by the House would raise the government’s borrowing limit until January 2025, ensuring the issue will not resurface before the next presidential election. As part of his negotiations with Biden, McCarthy successfully pushed for government spending cuts and changes to the work requirements for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.However, the concessions that McCarthy won fell far short for members of the freedom caucus, who had pushed for steeper spending cuts and much stricter work requirements for benefits programs. They belittled the debt ceiling compromise as a paltry effort to tackle the nation’s debt, which stands at more than $31tn.Representative Scott Perry of Pennsylvania, chair of the freedom caucus, said on Twitter before the vote, “President Biden is happily sending Americans over yet another fiscal cliff, with far too many swampy Republicans behind the wheel of a ‘deal’ that fails miserably to address the real reason for our debt crisis: SPENDING.”House freedom caucus members staged one last attempt to block the debt ceiling bill from advancing on Wednesday afternoon, when they opposed a procedural motion prior to the final vote. With 29 Republicans voting against the motion, McCarthy had to rely on Democratic assistance to advance the debt ceiling proposal. In the end, 52 Democrats voted for the motion, setting up the final vote and virtually ensuring the bill’s passage.The House Democratic leader, representative Hakeem Jeffries of New York, mocked McCarthy’s failure to unify his party, arguing the procedural vote proved the speaker has “lost control of the floor”.“It’s an extraordinary act that indicates just the nature of the extremism that is out of control on the other side of the aisle,” Jeffries said during the floor debate before the final vote. “Extreme Maga Republicans attempted to take control of the House floor. Democrats took it back for the American people.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDespite his sharp criticism of McCarthy and his Republican colleagues, Jeffries and the majority of the House Democratic caucus supported the debt ceiling bill. Although they lamented the spending cuts included in the bill, those Democrats argued the crucial importance of avoiding a default outweighed their personal concerns about the legislation.“Our constitution makes perfectly clear the validity of the public debt of the United States shall not be questioned,” said California representative Nancy Pelosi, the former Democratic House speaker. “While I find this legislation objectionable, it will avert an unprecedented default, which would bring devastation to America’s families.”But dozens of progressive lawmakers opposed the bill, attacking the spending cuts and new work requirements procured by McCarthy as an affront to the voters who elected them.“Republicans never cared about reducing the deficit, only about forcing through their anti-working family policy priorities under the threat of a catastrophic default,” said Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. “The deal they passed tonight proves that point, and I could not be part of their extortion scheme.”Progressives in the Senate, including Senator Bernie Sanders, have echoed that criticism and indicated they plan to oppose the debt ceiling proposal, but the bill still appears likely to become law. The Senate Democratic majority leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, has pledged to act swiftly to take up the bill once it has passed the House. The Senate Republican minority leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, has already indicated he plans to support the proposal as well.“Any needless delay, any last-minute brinksmanship at this point would be an unacceptable risk,” Schumer said in a floor speech Wednesday morning. “Moving quickly, working together to avoid default is the responsible and necessary thing to do.” More

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      McCarthy insists Republican support for debt deal ‘easy’ despite vocal opposition

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      The Republican speaker of the US House, Kevin McCarthy, insisted on Tuesday that supporting the debt ceiling deal would be “easy” for his party and it was likely to pass through Congress despite one prominent rightwinger’s verdict that the proposed agreement is a “turd sandwich”.Amid loud denunciations from the Republican right and also from closer to the centre, McCarthy said he was not worried the agreement would fail, or that it would threaten his hold on the speaker’s gavel.The bill is the “most conservative deal we’ve ever had”, McCarthy told reporters, of a two-year agreement that includes spending freezes and rescinding Internal Revenue Service funding while leaving military and veterans spending untouched.Negotiators fielded by McCarthy and Joe Biden reached the deal to raise the $31.4tn US debt ceiling last weekend.A default would be likely to have catastrophic consequences for the US and world economies. The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has said that will happen on 5 June if no bill is passed.But members of the far-right the House Freedom Caucus have balked at the deal.Chip Roy of Texas, who in January played a key role in securing the speakership for McCarthy after 15 rounds of voting, amid a rightwing rebellion, had perhaps the most pungent response.He said the debt ceiling deal was a “turd sandwich”, because it did not include spending cuts demanded by the hard right.Speaking to reporters at the Capitol on Tuesday, Roy said he had not changed his mind.“Right now, it ain’t good,” he said.Another rightwing firebrand, Thomas Massie of Kentucky, said he “anticipate[d] voting for” the bill, having said: “I think it’s important to keep in mind the debt limit bill itself does not spend money.”But a comparative moderate, Nancy Mace of South Carolina, resorted to personal abuse of Biden when she said on Twitter: “Washington is broken. Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants. I’m voting no on the debt ceiling debacle because playing the DC game isn’t worth selling out our kids and grandkids.”Republicans regularly claim without evidence that Biden, 80, is too old and mentally unfit to be president. Conversely, many political observers have credited Biden and his White House negotiators with pulling off a deal to avoid default while keeping Democrats on the front foot.Saluting Biden’s “capacity to over-perform after an onslaught of negative press and Democratic hand-wringing”, the Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin said: “Biden brushed back the litany of outrageous demands, kept his spending agenda and tax increases intact and got his two-year debt limit increase.“And in making a deal with [McCarthy] Biden helps stoke dissension on the GOP side as the extreme Maga wing denounces the agreement.”Biden has also faced criticism from progressives and from environmental activists, in the latter case over the inclusion in the deal of approval for a controversial pipeline in Virginia and West Virginia.“Singling out the Mountain Valley pipeline for approval in a vote about our nation’s credit limit is an egregious act,” said Peter Anderson of Appalachian Voices, which has charted hundreds of environmental violations by the project.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionRepublicans control the House by 222-213. By Tuesday afternoon, more than 20 Republicans had said they would vote against the deal. Donald Trump, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination, has said the party should let default happen if Biden does not cave.If defections proliferate, McCarthy could be left needing Democratic support to pass the bill arising from the deal and thereby avoid default.On Tuesday, the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said his party would do their part to win passage of the bill.“My expectation is House Republicans will keep their commitment to produce at least two-thirds of their conference which is approximately 150 votes” and pass the bill, Jeffries said. “Democrats are committed to making sure we do our part in avoiding default.”Jeffries said he did not think there would be a problem advancing the bill through the rules committee. That panel was due to consider the 99-page bill beginning at 3pm ET on Tuesday, ahead of votes in the Republican-controlled House and Democratic-held Senate.Democrats control the Senate 51-49. Some Senate Republicans have voiced dissatisfaction with the deal.On Tuesday, one of Biden’s negotiators, the budget director, Shalanda Young, said the White House “strongly urged” Congress to pass the bill. Wally Adeyemo, the deputy treasury secretary, told MSNBC the deal was a “good faith compromise” that took a debt default off the table.A White House spokesperson said Biden was having conversations with both progressive and moderate Democrats ahead of a House vote planned for Wednesday.Markets have reacted positively to the deal so far.Reuters contributed reporting More