President Biden entered the debt ceiling standoff at risk of becoming the first president to allow an economically catastrophic default on his watch. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy went into the talks facing whispers that a failure to appease his hard-right members would result in a swift and embarrassing end to his months-old speakership.
The deal the two leaders reached, which cleared the House in a bipartisan 314-117 vote on Wednesday evening, allowed Biden and McCarthy (R-Calif.) to avoid those worst-case scenarios and lay claim to a measure of victory. With an agreement that garnered more votes than condemnation from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, McCarthy and Biden each noted that they had defied the skeptics and sought to declare themselves triumphant.
“We’re going to deal with the debt ceiling,” Biden said Wednesday afternoon, expressing a sense of confidence before the vote. “I think things are going as planned.”
“Everybody has a right to their own opinion,” McCarthy said earlier, touting the GOP-friendly parts of the legislation in an effort to combat criticism from some in his party. “But on history, I’d want to be here with this bill today.”
The comments reflected an emboldened mood on the part of both men — an octogenarian Democrat who has faced questions about his age and ability to shepherd a vibrant, diverse party, and a California Republican who has been viewed as a weak leader beholden to his conference’s conservative firebrands. As the administration and the House kicked off negotiations in earnest a couple of weeks ago, the leaders’ fates became inextricably linked.
Wednesday night’s House vote to pass their agreement served as a validation of sorts, allowing McCarthy and Biden to show that they could pull off a critical bipartisan feat in an era of hyperpolarization. McCarthy appears to have survived the process without a serious challenge to his speakership, at least for now, while Biden will not have to ramp up his reelection campaign amid a calamitous default.
“This budget agreement is a bipartisan compromise,” Biden said in a statement Wednesday after the bill’s passage. “Neither side got everything it wanted. That’s the responsibility of governing.”
In the end, 71 Republicans broke ranks and voted against the bill in the House, while 149 voted in favor, allowing McCarthy to exceed the number of Republican votes that Democrats had demanded he provide. Democrats provided 165 votes for the bill with 46 opposing, a strong show of support for Biden, who had personally appealed to several lawmakers to back the deal.
McCarthy arguably started out from the more precarious position, having faced a chaotic series of 15 votes before securing the speakership in January. Due to some of the concessions he made to hard-right Republicans, many believed he would struggle to govern or pass meaningful legislation with his razor-thin majority, said Doug Heye, a Republican strategist who served in House leadership after the GOP takeover in 2010.
The budget deal allows McCarthy to rewrite the narrative, Heye said. “If we go back to when he was elected speaker, there were a lot of stories that called him a speaker in name only, with the conventional wisdom being that he would be run by his caucus and that he wouldn’t be able to do anything,” he added. “He has proven that to be false.”
Biden’s prediction during the 2020 campaign that Republicans would have an “epiphany” and return to bipartisanship after the presidency of Donald Trump was greeted with eye-rolling by many other Democrats. But the debt deal — especially coming after other bipartisan legislation he has championed, including bills that fund infrastructure and the microchip industry — could let him claim that he has repeatedly defied the skeptics.
To be sure, Biden and McCarthy still face strong criticism from liberal and conservative lawmakers over the deal, and dozens on each side angrily voted against the compromise backed by their parties’ leaders. Even among those who voted for the agreement, many said they did so with hesitation.
“Rome was not built in a day, and problems don’t get solved overnight,” Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said at the end of a lengthy Twitter thread explaining her support for the legislation despite its “flaws.” “It takes tenacious hard work and a commitment to never give up. This is a game of inches, and I intend for all of us to win.”
Both the president and Congress receive relatively low approval ratings from the public, and polls show Americans broadly opposed the idea of defaulting on the country’s debt. The deal’s passage in the House clears a considerable hurdle in avoiding a default, but obstacles remain. The government is slated to run out of funds to pay its obligation on Monday, so unexpected delays in passing the bill through the Senate could trigger a default.
“I cannot stress enough that we have no margin — no margin — for error,” Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) said on the floor Wednesday. “Either we proceed quickly and send this bipartisan agreement to the president’s desk or the federal government will default for the first time ever.”
Biden cut short a trip to Asia last month and called McCarthy from Air Force One to try to reset the negotiations, which had hit enough snags to begin worrying global leaders and investors. In the weeks since that call helped jump-start the talks, Biden and McCarthy have largely credited one another with negotiating in good faith, and their relationship seemed to evolve during the weeks of brinkmanship when neither could afford to fail.
Two months ago, McCarthy took a jab at Biden’s age as he complained that the president had not met with him yet. “I don’t know what more I can do,” McCarthy told reporters. “I would bring lunch to the White House. I would make it soft food if that’s what he wants. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it takes to meet.”
And as recently as May 5, Biden portrayed McCarthy as a hapless figure beholden to his party’s hard-liners. “He’s agreed to things that maybe he believes, but are just extreme,” Biden told MSNBC.
But by the time the deal was struck last Sunday, both men were speaking of each other with a measure of respect. “I think he negotiated with me in good faith,” Biden said of McCarthy. “He kept his word. He said what he would do. He did what he said he’d do.”
McCarthy, perhaps responding to his right flank, has been less publicly complimentary of Biden but has gone out of his way to praise Biden’s negotiating team. “I do want to thank the president’s team that he put together,” McCarthy said after the deal was struck. “Very professional, very smart. Very strong beliefs that are different than ours.”
Some White House officials were surprised in April when McCarthy managed to persuade his narrow, querulous Republican majority to a pass a bill that would have raised the debt limit but also slashed spending, effectively serving as an opening position for the negotiations. After that, Biden and other administration officials betrayed little doubt that McCarthy would be able to deliver enough Republican votes to pass any agreement that was reached.
After the deal was struck on Sunday, Biden suggested he did not want to loudly declare victory because doing so would make it harder for Republicans to back the compromise.
“Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote?” he told reporters at the White House. “You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
Biden campaigned for the presidency by touting his bargaining skills, contrasting his approach with that of former president Donald Trump, who oversaw a government shutdown and was impeached twice during two years of divided government. The debt ceiling standoff offered a new test of his ability to make good on those promises after Republicans took control of the House in 2022.
“One of Biden’s selling points is that he could negotiate with Republicans, given his long tenure in the Senate,” Heye said. “That was true here.”
After unveiling the deal over the weekend, the White House and McCarthy’s allies each scrambled to convince members of their parties that it amounted to a win both politically and substantively.
McCarthy had the tougher job, given the power of hard-right Republicans in the House who have threatened to oust him from his post if he failed to placate their demands on cutting government spending. While several of those Republicans have publicly criticized him over the deal, the final vote Wednesday made clear that they represented a minority of his caucus, and calls for his ouster have been few and muted.
As McCarthy gathered with House Republicans on Wednesday to rally support for the most significant legislation of his speakership, he received broad praise for the bill’s provisions that cap spending and implement new work requirements for some federal benefits, said Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.), the No. 3 House Republican.
“Members from all across the conference shared their support for this important bill,” Stefanik told reporters. “And they shared their support for Speaker McCarthy’s strong and effective leadership.”