House Republicans To Propose Lifting Debt Limit By $1.5 Trillion, Or Until March 31 2024
Updte (1753ET): The full House GOP debt limit legislation, formally referred to as the Limit, Save, Grow Act of 2023, can be read here.
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House Republicans will propose lifting the debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion, or until March 31, 2024 - whichever comes first, according to Punchbowl News' Jake Sherman.
🚨🚨 BREAKING: HOUSE REPUBLICANS will propose lifting the debt limit by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024, whichever comes first
— Jake Sherman (@JakeSherman) April 19, 2023
Bill expected to be posted shortly.
Politico's Sarah Ferris says McCarthy won't reveal more details beyond the text of the bill.
McCarthy said GOP will release text of debt limit bill today, won't reveal more details
— Sarah Ferris (@sarahnferris) April 19, 2023
Expects to pass next week
On Biden standoff: "Do they think this is right that the President refuses to even negotiate or talk?"
As Punchbowl reported earlier Tuesday;
Speaker Kevin McCarthy
For the first time in his career, McCarthy is charting the course for House Republicans in a high-stakes negotiation. The 58-year-old McCarthy — now the top Republican in the country — has been around these types of skirmishes for the better part of a dozen years, but he’s never called the shots.
McCarthy’s strategy is to try to pass something — anything — to show that he can move legislation through a fractious House. In McCarthy’s view, this will force Biden to negotiate and may shift the onus on Senate Democrats to pass their own bill.
Here are McCarthy’s challenges:
No. 1: McCarthy wants to pass a debt-limit bill with just one week of lead time. It won’t be easy, but that doesn’t mean it can’t happen. He’s letting conservatives fill this package up with whatever they want without going through committee markups. Just five Republican no votes will sink any bill, so there’s very little margin for error.
No. 2: What happens if McCarthy passes this bill? Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the White House are publicly insisting on a clean debt limit increase, and they think they can break McCarthy over this. Biden spoke to Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries on Tuesday and reiterated that none of them will negotiate on the debt limit.
Team McCarthy says they have no intention of ever passing a clean debt-limit increase. But that means that even after struggling to pass this bill, House GOP leaders could easily find they didn’t budge the Senate or White House one inch.
No. 3: The risk for McCarthy is that he’s advocating for all of these conservative policies, yet many of them will end up on the cutting room floor. This helps McCarthy with his right wing inside the conference, but potentially it’s a big effort with little real payoff.
No. 4: The calendar is a huge challenge for the speaker and the rest of Washington. It’s April 19. The latest estimates from Goldman Sachs and other analysts is that the U.S. government could reach the default deadline by mid-June. And a discharge petition may be all but useless at this point. There simply isn’t enough time. In fact, the only debt-limit related bill in committee right now repeals the debt limit entirely.
McCarthy holds a pretty bad hand here. The debt limit battlefield isn’t a good one for Republicans. Plus, he’s dealing with a conference that’s unusually interested in picking ideological fights they can’t win. McCarthy is doing what he must internally, but that doesn’t resolve his larger problems.
It's an election year. They'll plan to try and pin the debt on Dems. It won't work, but that's their strategy.
— Karoli (@Karoli) April 19, 2023
Developing...
