President Biden’s trip around the world during crucial debt ceiling talks could be cut short, the White House reported Tuesday.
He will leave for Japan on Wednesday to attend the G-7 summit, but may not go to Australia and Papua New Guinea.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed to reporters that the White House is “re-evaluating” the last two stops of the journey amid a deadlock over the debt ceiling and said a decision will be made soon.
Biden would address the Australian parliament, hold Quad meetings (Japan, India, Australia, US) and send a message to China about the unity of allies.
The potential change to Biden’s travel schedule came minutes before he sat down with congressional leaders to try to find a way to break the debt-limit deadlock.
“Get a good picture of all of us. We’re having a great time. Everything is going well,” Biden told reporters at the start of the meeting without making substantive comments on the state of affairs.
Speaker Kevin McCarthy said Monday morning that “no progress” had been made overnight in the debt ceiling negotiations, with only hours left before he was due to sit down with the president.
President Biden’s trip around the world during crucial debt ceiling talks could be cut short, White House reported Tuesday
Crunch time: Speaker of the House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Majority Leader in the Senate Chuck Schumer, Minority Leader in the Senate Mitch McConnell met with President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris in the Oval Office the day before Biden leaves for the G7 in Japan
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby confirmed to reporters that the White House is “re-evaluating” the final two stops of the trip amid a deadlock over the debt ceiling and said a decision will be made soon
Speaking at the White House on Tuesday, Kirby made it clear that the White House was reassessing the situation but refused to pull the plug completely.
“We’ll look at the rest of the trip,” he said.
“Should changes be made…we will absolutely report it appropriately,” he said.
Kirby called it “incredibly wise and responsible for the president to review the rest of the trip and evaluate whether it makes sense to move forward.”
The first hint that the trip was on the rocks came when Kirby described the agenda for Biden’s trip to Japan — which he said would include meetings with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. All members of the ‘Quad’ will already be in Japan.
Kirby left virtually no doubt that Biden would still travel to Japan on Wednesday.
He was also asked if Biden would apologize for the US dropping an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II in 1945, something President Obama refused to do while traveling to Hiroshima while in office.
Biden “intends to visit the memorial and pay his respects to the lives of the innocents who died in the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima,” Kirby said.
There is one personnel change for Tuesday’s meeting: Vice President Kamala Harris is in attendance.
She was consulted several times about the budget to avoid non-payment. This is something that — the president clearly respects her opinion and this meeting. He wants her consulted,” said White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre.
“I don’t see any progress,” McCarthy told reporters of the staff-level talks that took place over the weekend. “And it really worries me about the timeline of where we are.”
The Treasury Department reiterated on Monday that they still believe the day the nation runs out of money to pay its bills could be as early as June 1.
Majority Leader Steve Scalise expressed a similar level of pessimism: “I’m not even sure their negotiations will go through.”
Biden and the “Big Four,” McCarthy, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had their second meeting at the White House on Tuesday at 3 p.m.
The four met for the first time last Tuesday. They were originally supposed to meet again on Friday, but those talks were canceled, according to McCarthy, because not enough progress had been made with staff throughout the week.
“It doesn’t seem to me that they want a deal yet, it just seems like they want to look like they’re in a meeting, but they’re not talking about anything serious,” McCarthy told reporters Monday morning.
And just 16 days before June 1, Biden and McCarthy disagree on how they think debt ceiling negotiations are progressing.
“I really think there’s a desire on both their part and ours to get to an agreement, and I think we’re going to be able to do that,” an optimistic Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday.
“I stay optimistic because I’m an innate optimist.”
Biden declined to provide details on the status of the talks. “I learned a long time ago, and you know as well as I do, it’s never good to characterize a negotiation in the middle of a negotiation,” he said.
McCarthy characterized the talks as “still far apart.”
“It doesn’t seem like they want a deal yet, it just seems like they want to look like they’re in a meeting, but they’re not talking anything serious,” he told reporters Monday morning.
Majority whip Tom Emmer said he hoped Biden “did his homework” ahead of the meeting.
‘I hope that he will come up with other ideas or that he will support our idea. Those should be the only two choices. If the president goes to that meeting today, if he gives more empty rhetoric like he did in the previous meetings, you will show that he doesn’t mean business. I hope he means it, because we’ve been serious for a long time.’
“I really think there’s a desire on both their part and ours to come to an agreement, and I think we’re going to be able to do that,” an optimistic Biden told reporters in Delaware on Sunday.
“It looks like they would rather have a default than a deal,” the speaker said, adding that they need a deal before “this weekend” to have “a timeline to pass it in both houses.”
In a surprising development over the weekend, Biden showed openness to stricter job requirements for welfare programs, a top priority in the House GOP’s debt limit bill.
Biden said he had voted for the “tougher job requirements” in the past as a senator, but “it’s a different story for Medicaid, so I’ll wait and see what their proposal is exactly.”
The House Republicans’ debt limit bill, the Limit, Save Grow Act, included stricter work requirements for Medicaid, SNAP, and TANF.
Biden also appeared open to recovering unused Covid-19 funds, estimated to be between $50 billion and $70 billion. He is reportedly open to discretionary nonsense for the rest of his tenure.
In return, Biden is demanding that Republicans stop trying to reverse his key legislative achievements, which include easing student debt, limiting the spending cap to two years, and raising the debt ceiling at least through the elections of 2024.
Biden’s openness to job requirements enraged progressives.
“We didn’t choose Joe Biden from 1986,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal, D-Wash., President of the Progressive Caucus, to Politico. “We chose Joe Biden of 2020.”
She called adding new job requirements for SNAP an “absolutely terrible idea” and “a nonstarter for many of us in the Democratic caucus.”
“As we continue to negotiate the debt ceiling, we cannot contemplate the short-sighted Republican proposal to increase job requirements for utilities,” wrote Rep. Jerry Nadler, DN.Y., on Twitter.
Biden also said he planned to attend the G-7 in Japan on Wednesday — a trip he previously said he could participate virtually if debt limit talks forced him to stay in Washington.
“You would think if he knows he’s leaving the country and then finalizes these conversations before he leaves, he could do that. I would strongly encourage him to do that,” Scalise told reporters on Tuesday.
McCarthy said the president “didn’t take it seriously,” but stopped criticizing him for leaving the country during the negotiations.
The federal government reached its limit of $31.4 trillion in January, prompting the Treasury to take “extraordinary measures” to move money around and buy more time for Congress to work out a deal.
The Treasury now says the country may run out of money to pay its bills by June 1, though the exact date is unknown.
Biden has long pushed for Congress to present him with a “clean” debt ceiling bill and talk about spending cuts after the cap is raised. McCarthy has long maintained that he will not – use the debt ceiling as leverage to demand cuts to the federal budget.
The president, meanwhile, spent the weekend at his home in Rehoboth and will spend Monday attending his granddaughter Maisy’s graduation from the University of Pennsylvania.
