AMN / WEB DESK
US President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are to meet today (Monday) at the White House as they will negotiate raising the government’s borrowing limit.
Accordinf to VOA, Negotiators for the two sides met for more than two hours Sunday, while Biden and McCarthy spoke by telephone in a call that each described positively.
“It went well, we’ll talk tomorrow,” Biden told reporters upon returning to Washington from the Group of Seven summit in Japan.
McCarthy said the phone call was “productive.”
“I think we can solve some of these problems if he understands what we’re looking at,” McCarthy said. “But I’ve been very clear to him from the very beginning. We have to spend less money than we spent last year.”
U.S. President Joe Biden walks down the steps of Air Force One upon arrival at Marine Corps Air Station Iwakuni, western Japan, May 18, 2023, en route to Hiroshima for the Group of Seven nations’ summit.
The government could come up short and be unable to meet its financial obligations as soon as June 1.
Biden said earlier Sunday that House Republicans must move away from their “extreme position” on government spending and that there will be no agreement on only Republican terms.
“It’s time for Republicans to accept that there is no bipartisan deal to be made solely, solely, on their partisan terms,” Biden said at the end of the G-7 summit.
Biden said he had done his part by offering ways to raise the country’s $31.4 trillion borrowing limit so the U.S. government can keep paying its bills, such as interest on government bonds, stipends to U.S. pensioners and payments to health care providers and salaries for government employees and contractors.
Republicans in the House have called for sharp government spending cuts, rejecting the alternatives proposed by the White House, which has called for closing tax loopholes and more limited spending reductions. Previous presidents and congressional leaders have reached deals to raise the country’s debt limit 78 times in give-and-take negotiations in which neither side got everything on its wish list.