The NY Times does a process piece on how the President and his team went about dealing with the just completed budget negotiated ‘deal’….
It IS part of the after action political manoeuvring to make sure those in the Democratic Party and public see Biden as getting the ‘best’ of Republican House Speaker McCarthy…..Which they actually did….
Remember….
Biden has been doing this a decade as Vice President and now President….
McCarthy has not….
Added to the internal caucus problems for McCathy and the Republicans is the political winds these days are blowing against them as they try to drag America back to a place that is gone, carry an deal with a ex-President increasingly amassing criminal problems, that leads the GOP masses, but has little relevance to reality…..
The President, with control of the US Senate, and McCarthy with a slight House majority would make a deal that would annoy both parties fringe lawmakers….But Biden was keenly aware that he had to ALSO grease the wheel for McCarthy and he did.…and he had his Treasury Sec in the media pounding the parties on a deadline….’It IS the Way’…..
Good deal’s involve ‘givebacks’ by all parties…
But?
In the end it would favor a old-timer that had more in staff and savvy then the House Speaker….
In pursuit of an agreement, the Biden team was willing to give Republicans victory after victory on political talking points, which they realized Mr. McCarthy needed to sell the bill to his conference. They let Mr. McCarthy’s team claim in the end that the deal included deep spending cuts, huge clawbacks of unspent federal coronavirus relief money and stringent work requirements for recipients of federal aid.
But in the details of the text and the many side deals that accompanied it, the Biden team wanted to win on substance. With one large exception — a $20 billion cut in enforcement funding for the Internal Revenue Service — they believe they did.
The way administration officials see it, the full final agreement’s spending cuts are nothing worse than they would have expected in regular appropriations bills passed by a divided Congress. They agreed to structure the cuts so they appeared to save $1.5 trillion over a decade in the eyes of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office. But thanks to the side deals — including some accounting tricks — White House officials estimate that the actual cuts could total as little as $136 billion over the two enforceable years of the spending caps that are central to the agreement.
Much of the $30 billion in clawed-back Covid-19 money was probably never going to be spent, Biden officials say, including dollars from an aviation manufacturing jobs program that had basically ended.
At one point in the talks, administration officials offered to include in the deal more than 100 relief programs from which they were willing to rescind money. The final list spanned 20 pages of a 99-page bill, and Mr. McCarthy championed it on the House floor. But because much of the money was repurposed for other spending, the net savings added up to only about $11 billion over two years. One of the programs had a remaining balance of just $40….
…
Some Democrats and progressive groups have sharply criticized Mr. Biden for negotiating over the debt limit at all, denouncing the spending cuts and work requirements and saying he cemented Republicans’ ability to ransom the borrowing limit whenever a Democrat occupies the White House.
Republican negotiators sold the deal as a game-changing blow to Mr. Biden’s spending ambitions. “They absolutely have tire tracks on them in this negotiation,” Representative Garret Graves of Louisiana said before the House vote on Wednesday.
Mr. Biden views it differently….
The Washinton Post …..
….Privately, Biden delivered his pitch: A proposal to raise the debt ceiling that didn’t just slash spending but also generated new revenue, particularly through tax increases targeting the wealthy. The offer reflected a dramatic shift for a president who long had refused to haggle at all over the country’s credit, fearing that the risks of miscalculation could plunge the economy into a recession.
“This is nothing we want, just what we can tolerate,” Biden said in response to the GOP demands, according to two people with knowledge of the exchange.
McCarthy listened until the president’s chief of staff, Jeffrey Zients, interjected, criticizing Republicans for threatening to decimate funding for health care, education, science and more. That’s when the House speaker shot back: “You don’t have another option.”
“Are you blowing up the deal?” he pressed Zients, before turning to Biden: “Do you want him to blow up the deal?”
Both sides still left the meeting feeling that they had made progress toward an agreement. But the tense clash at the White House nonetheless came to illustrate the fear and acrimony that engulfed Washington over the past month, as a Republican crusade to slash federal spending nearly plunged the U.S. government into financial chaos. It took a frenetic, last-minute scramble by Biden and McCarthy — fierce political foes with no working relationship — before the nation could resolve a fiscal crisis largely of the GOP’s making.
In the end, the two leaders turned to a coterie of policy aides to broker a deal that neutered the threat of fiscal brinkmanship, at least for the immediate future. But their agreement stopped short of the dramatic, lasting changes to the nation’s souring financial health that some Republicans say are needed.
Their deal, the Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023, pares back federal spending by at least an estimated $234 billion over the next two years, but it barely dents a debt that is still expected to exceed $50 trillion by the end of the decade. It prevents gridlock from causing a government shutdown this fall, but only at the cost of massive automatic spending cuts that both sides see as too steep. And it quiets the possibility of a crippling default — until January 2025, ensuring a return to the fight after the next election…..
Biden and McCarthy Both Improved Their Political Standing
Playbook: “Somehow, both McCarthy and Biden emerged from the potential economic debacle in better political shape. Politics is often zero sum, but the FRA accomplished the chief political goals of both men.”
“McCarthy, who faced a humiliating path to the speakership, needed to strengthen his position within the House GOP conference.”
“Biden, whose job approval trendline has veered uncomfortably close to sinking below 40%, needed to strengthen his position with American voters.”