McCarthy managed to pass the bill in the House, but Schumer won’t let the Senate vote on it.
Barely two weeks ago, it didn’t look like House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had enough votes to pass a bill to increase the limit on the U.S. national debt. On April 19, when the California Republican released the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023 — intended to raise the ceiling by $1.5 trillion or extend it through March 31, “whichever occurs first” — NBC News noted: “Republicans have a narrow majority and can afford only four defections before the legislation collapses, with Democrats expected to vote against it en masse.”
Yet McCarthy pulled a surprising victory by managing to corral 217 votes for the bill last Wednesday, “after leadership made a flurry of last-minute changes designed to win over key GOP holdouts,” as CNN reported. McCarthy’s success had the immediate effect of eliciting angry denunciations from the White House.
“President Biden will never force middle class and working families to bear the burden of tax cuts for the wealthiest, as this bill does,” White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a statement. “The President has made clear this bill has no chance of becoming law.”
This is typical Democrat campaign rhetoric — “Tax cuts for the rich!” — with little or no relevance to the actual content of the bill that passed the House, which doesn’t change taxes at all. The real problem for President Joe Biden is that his team built its strategy around the belief that McCarthy couldn’t pass any debt-ceiling bill. Now that McCarthy has succeeded, Democrats have to demagogue the issue in order to protect their fragile majority in the Senate from being forced to take a vote on the debt ceiling.
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