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      Senate Democrats highlight ‘terrible choice’ of Republicans’ debt ceiling plan

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      Senate Democrats held a hearing on Thursday to lambaste House Republicans’ proposal to raise the US government’s borrowing limit in exchange for spending cuts, as economists testified that a federal default would bring disastrous and decades-long consequences.The hearing came a week after House Republicans narrowly passed the Limit, Save, Grow Act to raise the debt ceiling until May 2024. The legislation, championed by the House speaker, Kevin McCarthy, would also roll back federal discretionary spending to 2022 levels and cap annual increases at 1%.Mocking the bill as the “Default on America Act”, Democrats warned that the legislation would result in devastating cuts to veterans’ benefits, childcare access and infrastructure funding.“Republicans’ dangerous bill proposes a terrible choice: default on our financial obligations, causing widespread pain and wrecking our economy, or gut basic federal programs essential to our economic strength, causing widespread pain and wrecking our economy,” said Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic chair of the Senate budget committee. “It is a false and unnecessary choice.”Republicans on the committee countered that the House bill should be interpreted as an “opening bid” to kickstart negotiations with Joe Biden, who has repeatedly called on Congress to pass a “clean” bill raising the debt ceiling without any strings attached. Biden has invited the top four congressional leaders to a meeting at the White House next week to discuss the debt ceiling.“I hope when the president sits down with the speaker, he will bring an open mind and a serious counteroffer,” said Senator Chuck Grassley, the Republican ranking member of the budget committee. “The longer the president spends dragging his feet and putting off negotiations, the closer President Biden brings us to the first ever federal default in US history.”Three economists testified to the committee that a default would prove calamitous for the country and global markets, causing America’s unemployment rate to rise and its gross domestic product (GDP) to tumble.Dr Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody’s Analytics, predicted a “severe recession” in the US if lawmakers do not address the debt ceiling. The treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, sent a letter to congressional leaders on Monday informing them that the US government would be unable to cover its financial obligations as early as 1 June.Zandi added that this moment is “an especially inopportune time to have a political debate over the debt limit” because the current risk of an American recession is “uncomfortably high”. That risk heightens the danger of enacting House Republicans’ bill, Zandi argued.“It entails significant cuts to government spending … right at the point in time when the economy is going to be most vulnerable to going into recession,” Zandi said.But all three economists also agreed that the “unsustainable” trajectory of America’s debt must be met with urgency by policymakers.“We are sitting on a ticking timebomb,” said Brian Riedl, a senior fellow at the conservative thinktank Manhattan Institute. “Congress should be working diligently to avert an otherwise inevitable debt crisis, and raising the debt limit has historically been one opportunity to address the underlying debt problem.”Democrats expressed openness to amending the federal budget for the next fiscal year, which begins in October, but they emphasized that such a discussion must be separated from the immediate need to address the debt ceiling.“If we want to have a real discussion about revenues and spending, that’s great,” said Senator Debbie Stabenow, a Democratic member of the committee. “Don’t default. But let’s have that debate about what’s fair for the majority of American people.”Biden has similarly invited a bipartisan conversation on budgetary reform, but he has steadfastly rejected Republican efforts to tie the debt ceiling to government spending negotiations.“America is not a deadbeat nation,” Biden said on Monday. “We pay our bills, and we should do so without reckless hostage-taking from some of the [‘Make America Great Again’] Republicans in Congress.”Whitehouse noted Senate Democrats have introduced a two-page bill raising the debt ceiling until December 2024, ensuring the issue would not be revisited until after the next presidential election, but such a bill seems unlikely to pass the Republican-controlled House. Democrats in the House have simultaneously launched a long-shot bid to pass a clean debt ceiling bill through the lower chamber, but the odds of five of their Republican colleagues joining that effort seem slim to none.As the clock ticks down, lawmakers are running out of time to avoid catastrophe, Zandi testified.“We are on a certain unsustainable fiscal path. We need both additional tax revenue and we need spending restraint. Both of those things need to happen. But we can’t do that in the current environment,” Zandi told senators. “This is not the time to do it. We need to end this drama as quickly as possible.” More

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      Federal Reserve increases interest rates by a quarter point to 16-year high – as it happened

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      From 6h agoThe Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates this afternoon, with an announcement coming at 2pm ET from the central bank after its most recent board meeting. Analysts expect the Fed will raise rates by a quarter point, which will bring rates up to 5% to 5.25%. This would be the central bank’s 10th interest rate increase since March 2022, when rates were at zero.The interest rate increase will come at what in hindsight may seem like an inflection point for the economy. Inflation is down, consumer spending has flattened and growth in the job market is starting to slow down, but Fed officials, especially Fed chair Jerome Powell, have been stringent on getting inflation down to their target of 2%. Inflation in March was 5%, the lowest it’s been since 2021, but still quite far from 2%.Analysts and economists will be closely watching Powell’s press conference at 2.30pm, where he will discuss the direction Fed staff see the economy going, giving hints as to whether even more interest rate hikes are to come or whether the Fed will end its rate-hike campaign.Here’s a quick summary of everything that’s happened today:
      The Federal Reserve increased interest rates by a quarter point, bringing rates up to 5% to 5.25%. Fed chair Jerome Powell said that Fed officials no longer anticipate more hikes, but will monitor economic data to see if they are necessary in coming months. The stock market dipped slightly after the Fed’s announcement.
      The debate over the debt ceiling continued today, with news that Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell will keep himself out of the specific of negotiating talks and hints that senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are breaking from Dems and looking to take Senate negotiations seriously.
      2024 is already gearing up: Joe Biden released his second TV ad since launching his campaign last week, while US rep. Colin Allred of Texas announced his bid to unseat Texas senator Ted Cruz. In Nevada, Jim Marchant, an election denier and staunch supporter of Donald Trump, also announced a Senate big.
      We’ll be closing this blog for today. Thanks for reading.Democratic senator Raphael Warnock from Georgia said that his two young kids were on lockdown at school because of the shooting in midtown Atlanta.“They’re there. I’m here, hoping and praying they’re safe,” he said on the Senate floor. “Thoughts and prayers are not enough.”One person has been confirmed dead and at least four injured after a gunman opened fire in a building in midtown around 12.30pm ET. Police said they are still searching for a suspect.The Washington Post just published a cheery report that the White House and lawmakers on Capitol Hill technically have just six working days together before the US government potentially defaults on its debt on 1 June.With the House and Senate in session on different days, and Biden making international trips for the G7 summit in Japan and another “Quad” meeting with Australia, Japan and India in Australia, the legislative and executive branches are scheduled to have just six more days together to figure out the debt ceiling.Of course, negotiations can take place even when a chamber is not in session, but the precariousness of negotiations and the closeness of default makes the timing a tad inconvenient.Talking about the fallout of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank in March, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell said that it seems the worst of the crisis is over.“The severe period of stress, those have now all been resolved and all the depositors have been protected,” he said, adding that JPMorgan’s acquisition of First Republic bank marked the end of the worst of it all.Asked about lessons that he learned from the crisis, he noted that there needs to be stronger regulation and supervision, but declined to offer any specifics as he has tasked Fed vice chair Michael Barr with drafting specific policy proposals.“I am not aware of anybody thinking [the collapse] could happen so quickly,” Powell said. “Now that we know that was possible… it will be up to vice chair Barr to design ways to address that.”Today’s Federal Reserve interest rate hike is its second quarter-point hike in a row, after a series of half- and three-quarter point hikes over the last year. Fed chair Jerome Powell said at his press conference this afternoon that “slowing down was the right move”.“I think it’s enabled us to see more data and it will continue to do so. We have to always balance the risk of not doing enough and not getting inflation under control against the risk of maybe slowing down economic activity too much,” he said. “We thought that this rate hike, along with the meaningful change in our policy statement, was the right way to balance that.Asked about the possibility of a recession, Powell seemed optimistic that the Fed could achieve a “soft landing” – keeping interest rates high without seeing huge impacts on unemployment. He noted that even as rates have hit 5% over the last 14 months, the unemployment rate stands at 3.5%.“It’s possible that we can continue to have a cooling in the labor market without having the big increases in unemployment that have gone with many prior episodes,” he said.Of course, Powell noted earlier in the press conference that the full impacts of the interest rate increases have yet to be seen, acknowledging uncertainty about the full economic impact of rate hikes.Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell emphasized the importance of raising the debt ceiling, though noted that the debt limit is “fiscal policy matters”.“It’s essential that the debt ceiling be raised in a timely way so that the US government can pay all of its bills when they’re due. Failure to do that would be unprecedented,” he said. “We’d be in uncharted territory.Powell noted that the Fed doesn’t “give advice to either side” and also noted that “no one should assume that the Fed can protect the economy from the potential short- and long-term effects” upon default.He also noted that debt limit standoff did not play a role in the Fed’s decision today to increase interest rates.Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell is holding a press conference after the central bank announced a quarter-point interest rate increase. Powell’s tone in the press conference has changed since he last addressed the press in March. The Fed is no longer anticipating needing more rate increases, but will monitor the economy in determining future interest rate changes.While Powell is still reiterating the Fed’s inflation target of 2%, he acknowledged that the economy is “seeing the effects of our policy tightening on demand and the most interest-rate-sensitive sectors of the economy, particularly housing and investment”. In other words, the Fed sees its interest rate hikes taking effect in the slowing of the economy.“There are some signs that supply and demand in the labor market are coming back into balance,” Powell said. He added that the “economy is likely to face further headwinds from tighter credit conditions”, meaning the full effects of the interest-rate hikes have yet to be seen.Taking a question from a reporter on whether the Fed’s statement today should be taken as a hint that officials will pause rate hikes, Powell said the officials did not make a decision on a pause, but noted that they intentionally updated their stance in today’s press statement that removed a line suggesting more increases would be appropriate.“Instead, we’re saying that in determining the extent to which [more hikes are needed], the Committee will take into account certain factors,” he said. “That’s a meaningful change that we are no longer saying we anticipate [changes] and we will be driven by incoming data meeting by meeting.”The press statement that came with the Federal Reserve’s announcement of another interest rate hike is nearly identical to the one that was released at its last meeting on 22 March, with one key exception.In its 22 March release, Fed officials in the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) hinted that more interest rates are to come, saying: “The Committee anticipates that some additional policy firming may be appropriate” in order to bring inflation down to the target of 2%.In today’s statement, that line was cut.The rest of the statement was in line with FOMC’s March meeting statement. They reiterated their stance that “inflation remains elevated” and the jobs market has been strong, with the unemployment rate low. They emphasized that “the US banking system is sound and resilient” and that they are “highly attentive to inflation risks”.Analysts have been wondering whether this interest rate increase will be the Fed’s last, with pauses to come after as the interest rate is held steady at future meetings.Any more hints about what is next for interest rates after this most recent hike will likely be made at Fed chair Jerome Powell’s press conference at 2.30pm ET.The Federal Reserve just announced a quarter-point interest rate increase. This brings the interest rate to a 16-year high at 5% to 5.25%. The central bank has been on a year-long campaign to temper inflation, though it has had to delicately balance the potential of shaking the economy too much with stringent rate increases.Fed chair Jerome Powell will lead a closely watched press conference, where he will discuss the Fed’s view on the state of the economy.The United Auto Workers (UAW) union said in an internal memo that it is holding off on a Joe Biden endorsement due to the president’s electric vehicle policies.UAW president Shawn Fain said in the memo that union leaders met with Biden last week and discussed “our concerns with the electric vehicle transition”, according to the New York Times. The union is concerned that auto workers will suffer during the transition to EV as less workers are needed to assemble EVs.“The EV transition is at serious risk of becoming a race to the bottom,” the memo reads, referring to electric vehicles. “We want to see national leadership have our back on this before we make any commitments.”The union has 400,000 members across the country, though members are primarily in auto-industry heavyweight Michigan, a key election battleground state.The FBI arrested a man in Florida on Tuesday for his involvement in the January 6th Capitol riots, specifically for setting off an “explosive device” in the US Capitol tunnel that leads into the building. Daniel Ball, 38, was first arrested last week by the Citrus County Sheriff’s Office for assaulting seven people, including law enforcement officers, in Florida. Ball’s probation officer, upon being shown photos and videos of the Capitol riot, identified Ball as the person throwing an explosive device in the tunnel, where law enforcement was blocking rioters.Ball faces multiple charges related to the riot, including assaulting police officers and entering a restricted area with a deadly weapon.The justice department said in March that at least 1,000 people have been arrested on charges related to the riots, with 518 pleading guilty to federal crimes so far.Election denier Jim Marchant announced that he will be running for US Senate, challenging Democrat incumbent senator Jacky Rosen for the seat she won last year.During his announcement speech on Tuesday, Marchant said that he is running to “protect Nevadans from the overbearing government, from Silicon Valley, from big media, from labor unions, from the radical gender-change advocates,” the Washington Post reported.His election campaign was acknowledged by Rosen on Twitter, who replied to Marchant’s announcement:
      Nevadans deserve a Senator who will fight for them, not a MAGA election denier who opposes abortion rights even in cases of rape and incest…
      While far-right politicians like Jim Marchant spread baseless conspiracy theories, I’ve always focused on solving problems for Nevadans.
      Marchant has described himself as a “MAGA conservative”, the Post reports, and is an avid supporter of Donald Trump. More

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      North Carolina Gerrymander Ruling Reflects Politicization of Judiciary Nationally

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      When it had a Democratic majority last year, the North Carolina Supreme Court voided the state’s legislative and congressional maps as illegal gerrymanders. Now the court has a Republican majority, and says the opposite.Last year, Democratic justices on the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled that maps of the state’s legislative and congressional districts drawn to give Republicans lopsided majorities were illegal gerrymanders. On Friday, the same court led by a newly elected Republican majority looked at the same facts, reversed itself and said it had no authority to act.The practical effect is to enable the Republican-controlled General Assembly to scrap the court-ordered State House, Senate and congressional district boundaries that were used in elections last November, and draw new maps skewed in Republicans’ favor for elections in 2024. The 5-to-2 ruling fell along party lines, reflecting the takeover of the court by Republican justices in partisan elections last November.The decision has major implications not just for the state legislature, where the G.O.P. is barely clinging to the supermajority status that makes its decisions veto-proof, but for the U.S. House, where a new North Carolina map could add at least three Republican seats in 2024 to what is now a razor-thin Republican majority. Overturning such a recent ruling by the court was a highly unusual move, particularly on a pivotal constitutional issue in which none of the facts had changed.The North Carolina case mirrors a national trend in which states that elect their judges — Ohio, Kentucky, Kansas, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and others — have seen races for their high court seats turned into multimillion-dollar political battles, and their justices’ rulings viewed through a deeply partisan lens.Such political jockeying once was limited mostly to confirmation fights over seats on the U.S. Supreme Court. But as the nation’s partisan divide has deepened, and the federal courts have offloaded questions about issues like abortion and affirmative action to the states, choosing who will decide state legal battles has increasingly become an openly political fight.The new Republican majority of justices said the North Carolina Supreme Court had no authority to strike down partisan maps that the General Assembly had drawn.“Our constitution expressly assigns the redistricting authority to the General Assembly subject to explicit limitations in the text,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote for the majority. “Were this court to create such a limitation, there is no judicially discoverable or manageable standard for adjudicating such claims.”Justice Newby said that Democrats who led the previous court had claimed to have developed a standard for deciding when a political map was overly partisan, but that it was “riddled with policy choices” and overstepped the State Constitution’s grant of redistricting powers to the legislature.Legal scholars said the ruling also seemed likely to derail a potentially momentous case now before the U.S. Supreme Court involving the same maps. In that case, Moore v. Harper, leaders of the Republican-run legislature have argued that the U.S. Constitution gives state lawmakers the sole authority to set rules for state elections and political maps, and that state courts have no role in overseeing them.Now that the North Carolina Supreme Court has sided with the legislature and thrown out its predecessor’s ruling, there appears to be no dispute for the federal justices to decide, the scholars said.The ruling drew a furious dissent from one of the elected Democratic justices, Anita S. Earls, who said that it was pervaded by “lawlessness.” She accused the majority of making specious legal arguments, and at times using misleading statistics, to make a false case that partisan gerrymandering was beyond its jurisdiction.“The majority ignores the uncontested truths about the intentions behind partisan gerrymandering and erects an unconvincing facade that only parrots democratic values in an attempt to defend its decision, ” she wrote. “These efforts to downplay the practice do not erase its consequences and the public will not be gaslighted.”Some legal experts said the ruling underscored a trend in state courts that elect their justices, in which decisions in politically charged cases increasingly align with the ideological views of whichever party holds the majority on the court, sometimes regardless of legal precedent.“If you think the earlier State Supreme Court was wrong, we have mechanisms to change that, like a constitutional amendment,” Joshua A. Douglas, a scholar on state constitutions at the University of Kentucky College of Law, said in an interview. “But changing judges shouldn’t cause such a sea change in the rule of law, because if that’s the case, precedent has no value any longer, and judges really are politicians.”The state court also handed down two more rulings in politically charged cases, overturning decisions that favored voting-rights advocates and their Democratic supporters.In the first, the justices reconsidered and reversed a ruling by the previous court, again along party lines, that a voter ID law passed by the Republican majority in the legislature violated the equal protection clause in the State Constitution.In the second, the justices said a lower court “misapplied the law and overlooked facts crucial to its ruling” when it struck down a state law denying voting rights to people who had completed prison sentences on felony charges but were not yet released from parole, probation or other court restrictions.The lower court had said that the state law was rooted in an earlier law written to deny voting rights to African Americans, a conclusion that the Supreme Court justices said was mistaken.The new ruling undid a decision that had restored voting rights to more than 55,000 North Carolinians who had completed prison sentences. Those rights are now revoked, lawyers said, although the status of former felons who had already registered or voted under the previous ruling appeared unclear.The ruling on Friday in the gerrymander case, now known as Harper v. Hall, came after partisan elections for two Supreme Court seats in November shifted the seven-member court’s political balance to 5-to-2 Republican, from 4-to-3 Democratic.The Democratic-controlled court ruled along party lines in February 2022 that both the state legislative maps and the congressional district maps approved by the Republican legislature violated the State Constitution’s guarantees of free speech, free elections, free assembly and equal protection.A lower court later redrew the congressional map to be used in the November elections, but a dispute over the State Senate map, which G.O.P. leaders had redrawn, bubbled back to the State Supreme Court last winter. In one of its last acts, the Democratic majority on the court threw out the G.O.P.’s State Senate map, ordering that it be redrawn again. The court then reaffirmed its earlier order in a lengthy opinion.Ordinarily, that might have ended the matter. But after the new Republican majority was elected to the court, G.O.P. legislative leaders demanded that the justices rehear not just the argument over the redrawn Senate map, but the entire case.The ruling on Friday came after a brief re-argument of the gerrymander case in mid-March.North Carolina voters are almost evenly split between the two major parties; Donald J. Trump carried the state in 2020 with 49.9 percent of the vote. But the original map of congressional districts approved by the G.O.P. legislature in 2021, and later ruled to be a partisan gerrymander, would probably have given Republicans at least 10 of the state’s 14 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.Using a congressional map drawn last year by a court-appointed special master, the November election delivered seven congressional seats to each party. With the decision on Friday, the G.O.P. legislature is likely to approve a new map along the lines of its first one, giving state Republicans — and the slender Republican majority in the U.S. House — the opportunity to capture at least three more seats. More

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      House G.O.P., Divided Over Immigration, Advances Border Crackdown Plan

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      Republicans are eyeing a vote next month on legislation that would reinstate Trump-era policies, after feuding that led leaders to drop some of the plan’s most extreme provisions.WASHINGTON — House Republicans on Thursday pushed ahead with a sweeping immigration crackdown that would codify several stringent border policies imposed by the Trump administration, after months of internal feuding that led G.O.P. leaders to drop some of the plan’s most extreme provisions.The House Judiciary and Homeland Security Committees in recent days approved their pieces of the plan, which has little chance of being considered in the Democratic-led Senate but sets up a pivotal test of whether Republican leaders can deliver on their campaign promise to clamp down on record migrant inflows.For Republicans, who have repeatedly attacked President Biden on his immigration policies and embarked on an effort to impeach his homeland security secretary, the measure is a chance to lay out an alternative vision on an issue that galvanizes its right-wing base.The legislation, now expected on the floor next month, would direct the Biden administration to resume constructing the border wall that was former President Donald J. Trump’s signature project. It would also mandate that employers check workers’ legal status through an electronic system known as E-Verify and reinstate the “Remain in Mexico” policy, forcing asylum applicants to wait in detention facilities or outside the United States before their claims are heard.The plan “will force the administration to enforce the law, secure the border, and reduce illegal immigration once again,” Representative Mark E. Green, Republican of Tennessee and the Homeland Security Committee’s chairman, said during the panel’s debate on Wednesday.Democrats have derided the package as misguided and draconian, accusing Republicans of seeking to invigorate their core supporters in advance of the 2024 election by reviving some of Mr. Trump’s most severe border policies. They made vocal objections to provisions that would ban the use of the phone-based app known as “C.B.P. One” to streamline processing migrants at ports of entry, expedite the deportation of unaccompanied minors, and criminalize visa overstays of more than 10 days.Republicans “want to appeal to their extreme MAGA friends more than they want progress,” Representative Bennie Thompson of Mississippi, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security Committee, said Wednesday, calling the Republican legislation a “profoundly immoral” piece of legislation that would “sow chaos at the border.”Still, the package represents a compromise of sorts between hard-right Republicans and more mainstream G.O.P. lawmakers, including a mostly Latino group from border states that balked at proposals that threatened to gut the nation’s asylum system.The party’s immigration plan — which top Republicans had hoped to pass as one of their first bills of their new House majority — has been stalled for months. A faction led by Representative Tony Gonzales, Republican of Texas, has raised concerns about the asylum changes, threatening to withhold votes that Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, cannot afford to lose given his slim majority.Over the last week, G.O.P. leaders have quietly made a series of concessions to win over the skeptics. Republicans on the Judiciary Committee agreed to drop a provision that would have effectively stopped the intake of asylum seekers if the government failed to detain or deport all migrants seeking to enter the country without permission. But the measure still contains a number of new asylum restrictions.“It’s in a good spot,” Mr. Gonzales said of the legislation on Thursday, saying that the changes made to the asylum provision had satisfied his concerns. “As long as nobody does any funny business — you’ve got to watch it till the very end.”G.O.P. leaders predicted on Thursday that they would be able to draw a majority for the legislation when it comes to the House in mid-May, a timeline selected to coincide with the expected expiration of a Covid-era policy allowing officials to swiftly expel migrants at the border. The termination of the program, known as Title 42, is expected to inspire a new surge of attempted border crossings and supercharge the already bitter partisan debate over immigration policy.But it was unclear whether Republicans who had objected to the E-Verify requirement would be on board.Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky withheld his support for the Judiciary Committee’s bill because of the work authorization mandate, arguing that people “shouldn’t have to go through an E-Verify database to exercise your basic human right to trade labor for sustenance.”Such databases “always get turned against us, and they’re never used for the purpose they were intended for,” added Mr. Massie, a conservative libertarian.Representative Dan Newhouse, a Republican farmer in Washington State, has expressed concern that the E-Verify mandate could create labor shocks in the agricultural sector, which relies heavily on undocumented immigrant labor. Though the legislation delays the requirement for farmers for three years, Mr. Newhouse has argued that any such change should be paired with legislation creating more legal pathways for people to work in the United States.With the expected floor vote just weeks away, G.O.P. leaders have been treading carefully, even making last-minute concessions to Democrats in hopes of bolstering support for the legislation.During the wee hours on Thursday morning, as the Homeland Security Committee debated its bill, Republicans pared back language barring nongovernmental organizations that assist undocumented migrants from receiving funding from the Department of Homeland Security. They did so after Democrats pointed out the broadly phrased prohibition could deprive legal migrants and U.S. citizens of critical services as well.Their changes did not go far enough to satisfy Democrats, who unanimously opposed the package on the Judiciary and the Homeland Security panels — and are expected to oppose the combined border security package en masse on the House floor.They have also argued that any measure to enhance border security or enforcement must be paired with expanded legal pathways for immigrants to enter the United States. More

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      US House passes debt ceiling bill in tactical victory for Kevin McCarthy

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      House Republicans narrowly passed sweeping legislation on Wednesday that would raise the government’s legal debt ceiling by $1.5tn in exchange for steep spending restrictions, a tactical victory for the House speaker Kevin McCarthy as he challenges Joe Biden to negotiate and prevent a catastrophic federal default this summer.Biden has threatened to veto the Republican package, which has almost no chance of passing the Senate in the meantime, where Democrats hold a slim majority.The president has so far refused to negotiate over the debt ceiling which the White House insists must be lifted with no strings to ensure America pays its bills.But McCarthy’s ability to swiftly unite his slim majority in the House and bring the measure to passage over opposition from Democrats and even holdouts in his own party gives currency to the Republican speaker’s strategy to use the vote as an opening bid forcing Biden into talks. The two men could hardly be further apart on how to resolve the issue.The bill passed by a razor-thin 217-215 margin.“We’ve done our job,” McCarthy said after the vote.“The president can no longer ignore” the issue of federal spending limits, he said. “Now he should sit down and negotiate.”As the House debated the measure, Biden indicated he was willing to open the door to talks with McCarthy, but not on preventing a first-ever US default that would shake America’s economy and beyond.“Happy to meet with McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended,” Biden said. “That’s not negotiable.”Passage of the sprawling 320-page package in the House is only the start of what is expected to become a weeks-long political slog as the president and Congress try to work out a compromise that would allow the nation’s debt, now at $31tn, to be lifted to allow further borrowing and stave off a fiscal crisis.The nation has never defaulted on its debt, and the House Republican majority hopes to maneuver Biden into a corner with its plan to roll back federal spending to fiscal 2022 levels and cap future spending increases at 1% over the next decade, among other changes.In exchange for raising the debt limit by $1.5 trillion into 2024, the bill would roll back overall federal spending and:
      Claw back unspent Covid-19 funds.
      Impose tougher work requirements for recipients of food stamps and other government aid.
      Halt Biden’s plans to forgive up to $20,000 in student loans.
      End many of the landmark renewable energy tax breaks Biden signed into law last year. It would tack on a sweeping Republican bill to boost oil, gas and coal production.
      Democrats derided the Republican plan as a “ransom note”, a “shakedown” and “an unserious bill” that was courting financial danger.It’s a first big test for the president and the Republican speaker, coming at a time of increased political anxiety about the ability of Washington to solve big problems amid the need to raise the federal debt limit in a matter of weeks.The treasury department is taking “extraordinary measures” to pay the bills, but funding is expected to run out this summer. Economists warn that even the serious threat of a federal debt default would send shockwaves through the economy.A nonpartisan congressional budget office analysis estimated the Republican plan would reduce federal deficits by $4.8tn over the decade if the proposed changes were enacted into law.In the Senate, leaders were watching and waiting.Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer said House passage of the legislation would be a “wasted effort” and that McCarthy should come to the table with Democrats to pass a straightforward debt-limit bill without GOP priorities and avoid default.Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, who stepped aside to give McCarthy the lead, said the speaker has been able to unite the House Republicans.Now, he said, Biden and McCarthy must come to agreement. Otherwise, he said, “We’ll be at a standoff. And we shouldn’t do that to the country.” More

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      How Joe Biden Can Win in 2024

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      In 2024, the fate of the Democratic Party will rest in the hands of an 81-year-old incumbent president whom a majority of the country disapproves of and even many Democratic voters think should step aside rather than run for re-election.In the past, the conventional wisdom would be that President Biden faces an uphill battle to win a second term. But in today’s volatile, polarized political environment — in which Mr. Biden’s predecessor and potential general election opponent, Donald Trump, became the first ex-president to be criminally indicted and Democrats posted a history-defying midterm performance — he opens his re-election campaign in a stronger position than many would expect.He can make a compelling case for his first-term accomplishments, his steady leadership and a vision of the country fundamentally different from what is on offer from Republicans — of freedom of opportunity and opportunity of freedom for all Americans.A number of factors have worked in his favor. Because of his age, Mr. Biden has been dogged by speculation about his re-election plans. But no major candidate has stepped up to challenge him in the Democratic primary, which will allow him and his campaign team to focus their time, efforts and resources on the general election.For months, Democrats have been frustrated with the gap between Mr. Biden’s accomplishments and the public’s awareness of them. Despite a flurry of big-ticket legislation that the president signed into law in 2021 and 2022, a February poll showed that 62 percent of Americans — including 66 percent of independents — believed that the Biden administration has accomplished either “not very much” or “little or nothing.” The administration has already begun chipping away at this perception deficit, with the president, vice president and cabinet officials fanning out to battleground states and other parts of the country to spotlight these accomplishments.The timing is right, because these programs are starting to have a big impact on the lives of many Americans. In March, Eli Lilly became the first major drug company to announce that it would cap out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 a month, matching the Inflation Reduction Act’s cap on insulin costs for seniors. The administration says it has financed over 4,600 bridge repair and replacement projects across the country. And the private sector has committed over $200 billion in manufacturing investments since the passage of the Chips and Science Act, including $40 billion to build new semiconductor factories in Arizona and $300 million to manufacture semiconductor parts in Bay County, Mich.Mr. Biden has even made gains in mitigating voters’ concerns about his age. First, there was his lively, 73-minute State of the Union address, where he sparred ably with heckling Republicans, baiting them into backing his positions on Social Security and Medicare. And his surprise trip to Ukraine, which was the first time in modern history that a president visited an active war zone outside of the control of the U.S. military, received expansive coverage.But Mr. Biden’s biggest advantage might not come from anything he has done. Instead, it might come from the chaos among Republicans. This is welcome news for the president, who is fond of telling voters, “Don’t compare me to the almighty; compare me to the alternative.”There has been talk among many Republican leaders and donors about moving on from Mr. Trump — most recently, in the weeks after the 2022 midterms — but the base isn’t following their lead. Since his indictment by a Manhattan grand jury, his grip on the party, at least based on recent polling evidence, has grown tighter. That may be good news for his campaign, but he has significant vulnerabilities in a general election.And Mr. Trump is just the beginning of the G.O.P.’s problems. In recent years, the electorate has become more supportive of abortion rights. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, election after election has provided evidence of that. Yet Republicans have not come up with an answer — and in some ways, they seem to be making the problem worse. This month, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida signed into law a six-week abortion ban, which would prohibit the procedure before many women even know they are pregnant. Candidates and likely contenders including former Vice President Mike Pence, Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina and former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas have endorsed extreme anti-abortion measures that would be effected nationally — upending years of Republican claims that abortion should be “left to the states.”There are no signs that abortion is letting up as a top issue for voters. This month, liberals won control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court for the first time in over a decade after Judge Janet Protasiewicz ran a campaign focused on abortion rights and extremism on the right and secured an 11-point victory.A key part of Mr. Biden’s appeal for Democrats is that he doesn’t provoke the sort of divisiveness that Mr. Trump does. Despite Mr. Biden’s sagging approval ratings, in the 2022 midterms, we saw that voting against the president was not a big motivator for many Americans (compared with 2018, when casting a vote against Mr. Trump was a substantial motivator).If these trends continue, Democratic voters will continue to be motivated to vote against an extremist Republican Party — and Democrats will stand a good chance of winning the critical independent bloc.President Biden and his team still have work to do to firm up his support before the election. First up is navigating a debt-ceiling showdown with Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the House, where Republican gamesmanship threatens the nation’s credit rating and could spike Americans’ mortgage, student loan and car payment rates. The issue is tailor-made to play to Mr. Biden’s core strength — that he is a competent, steady hand in an otherwise chaotic political system.The Biden team will also need to increase their messaging to voters about what he has been able to achieve in his first term and what’s at stake over the next four years. That effort will focus in particular on swing-state voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona and Georgia, and will highlight progress in critical areas like infrastructure, manufacturing and job creation.Mr. Biden’s announcement video provides a preview of what we’ll be hearing from him over the next 18 months, and the subsequent four years if he’s re-elected: He is a defender of democracy and a protector of Americans’ personal freedoms and rights, including the rights of Americans to make their own decisions about reproductive health, to vote and to marry the person they love. The video juxtaposes chaotic images of Jan. 6, abortion protests outside the Supreme Court and Republican firebrands like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene with wholesome videos of Mr. Biden hugging and holding hands with Americans from every walk of life.The message is as subtle as sledgehammer: Do you really want to hand the country over to the Republicans and relive the chaos of the Trump years?Ultimately, if Joe Biden emerges victorious in November 2024, it will be because voters preferred him to the alternative — not to the almighty.Lis Smith (@Lis_Smith), a Democratic communications strategist, was a senior adviser to Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign and is the author of the memoir “Any Given Tuesday: A Political Love Story.”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