President Joe Biden is ready to discuss the debt ceiling with congressional leaders at the White House in a high-profile session with reverberations across the globe as early outlines of a potential deal begin to emerge from painstakingly slow negotiations.
Crucial debt ceiling negotiations are still far from success, but a deal is possible by the end of the week, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy said after a brief meeting Tuesday with President Joe Biden and other congressional leaders at the White House.
Meanwhile, Biden is cutting short his upcoming foreign trip because of the looming debt limit crisis, adding urgency to the talks. McCarthy said one new development is that the president has “changed the scope” of who is negotiating in the staff conversations that have been slow-going over the past week.
“It is possible to get to a deal by the end of the week,” McCarthy told reporters.
Tuesday’s meeting was pivotal as negotiators were staring down a June 1 deadline, which is when the Treasury Department says the U.S. could begin defaulting on its debts.
Biden is cutting short his planned trip to Japan, Papua New Guinea and Australia, set to begin Wednesday. He will still attend a G-7 summit in Japan but is canceling the later stops, according to three people with knowledge of the decision who were granted anonymity to discuss the unannounced decision.
Biden met with the congressional leaders in the Oval Office.
“We’re just getting started,” Biden he said in brief remarks to reporters, while others in the meeting — Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, D-N.Y., and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky. — sat soberly.
Biden will still attend the Group of Seven summit in Hiroshima, Japan, as planned but canceled the later stops ould cancel the later stops. Kirby noted that Biden will already have met with some of the leaders of the so-called “Quad” — the purpose of the Australia leg of the visit — while in Japan, even as he cautioned that no final decisions have been made.
“We wouldn’t even be having this discussion about the effect of the debt ceiling debate on the trip, if Congress would do its job, raise the debt ceiling the way they’ve always done,” Kirby said.
While Biden has remained upbeat that “we’ll be able to do this,” McCarthy has prodded the president to move faster and has been far more pessimistic on the state of the talks. He and other Republicans are demanding budget cuts in exchange for their support for raising the debt ceiling.
