After meeting at the White House Tuesday, it appears President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy are still at an impasse over raising the nation’s debt limit.
“The House has raised the debt ceiling and passed the bill. That’s why we had a meeting today. Everybody in this meeting reiterated the positions they were at. I didn’t see any new movement,” McCarthy said. “The president said the staff should get back together. But I was very clear with the president. We have now just two weeks to go.”
Recently on Talk 99.5’s “Leland Live” radio show in Birmingham, U.S. Rep. Barry Moore (R-Enterprise) criticized Biden over his refusal to negotiate with Republicans on the debt ceiling.
“I wouldn’t say we will default on the debt, but I will say this, I think the House, we did a fine job,” Moore said. “Over 70 days, McCarthy has asked (Biden) to sit down and ‘let’s talk about this, let’s discuss this. Mr. President present a plan. Present some options, some things to work with. Let’s see what your thoughts are. Let’s negotiate.’ He’s nowhere to be found. He’s missing in action.”
The congressman said Republicans in the House did the responsible thing by passing their own bill.
“We took it upon ourselves and to put what I think was a reasonable debt ceiling bill out,” he said. “Sure, it didn’t have everything. It didn’t have the cuts necessarily that some of us wanted, but I think it was an excellent plan, and it’s just trying to get to pre-COVID levels and to claw back some of that unspent COVID money and to do away with the 80,000 new IRS agents that the Biden administration wanted to hire.”
Moore believes people will not buy into the scare tactics coming from the Democrats on this issue.
“That kind of stuff that we put in that debt ceiling was really reasonable and I think the America people agree with us and I think the conservatives in the Senate appreciate the House working together to get this out … and the Biden administration knows, they know the American people will agree with us,” he said. “So sure they’re going to try to scare the American people, but the President himself said COVID was over. We don’t need to keep those spending levels at the high levels that they were.”
He also thinks the Republican plan is one way to start getting a handle on the inflation problem in the American economy.
“If we really want to control inflation and stop letting it bear down on the American people,” he said, “we’ve got to stop printing money in D.C. and get back to some reasonable semblance of managing the process and trying to control spending, and that’s what we’re going to do.”
Yaffee is a contributing writer to Yellowhammer News and hosts “The Yaffee Program” weekdays 9-11 a.m. on WVNN. You can follow him on Twitter @Yaffee
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