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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy turned to a close adviser who helped him lock up the votes to be elected speaker for an even tougher assignment: brokering a deal to avoid a historic default on country’s credit limit.
Rep. Garret Graves isn’t a top elected leader or committee chairman, but his low-key demeanor and expertise on energy policy landed him a seat across from the president’s top aides in the debt ceiling talks.
South Dakota GOP Rep. Dusty Johnson recently summed up Graves‘ approach in a House GOP conference that is full of lawmakers with national nicknames who make the rounds on cable news and have large social media followings: „Garret Graves is anonymous to everyday Americans, and that’s exactly the way he wants it.“
Graves helped McCarthy round up the votes to be elected speaker — after 15 ballots over 4 days of tense talks. Now he’s pushing the speaker’s agenda for shrinking federal spending as part of a deal to increase the country’s borrowing authority.
„The numbers are foundational here — the speaker has been very clear: a red line is spending less money and unless and until we’re there, the rest of it is really irrelevant,“ Graves said after one negotiating session at the Capitol.
Over days of talks, he fields questions from a growing pack of reporters covering the various negotiating sessions. On Tuesday he was blunt: „I’m telling you that we still have substantial distance between us and them on the numbers right now,“ referring to the gulf between the House Republicans and the White House negotiators.Graves‘ role brokering GOP bills among ‚5 families‘
The Louisiana Republican played a critical role for McCarthy during the drawn-out fight for the speakership in January, which put him in the middle of a bloc of members who were issuing demands.
Republican Study Committee Chairman Kevin Hern, R-Okla., who heads a group of fiscal conservatives that includes Graves, says it was good practice for what was to come.
„You have to appoint people that can sit there and grind this out,“ Hern said of the debt limit negotiations.
