Politics can be a cutthroat game. But no one wants to see this happen.
And Ted Cruz revealed this tragic news about President Biden.
The United States is on the very edge of defaulting on our debts.
Republicans are urging Democrats to agree to spending cuts in exchange for a debt ceiling increase so that we don’t end up in the exact same situation next year.
Democrats – always generous with others’ money – are balking at the suggestion.
This has led to calls for Biden to meet with Congressional Republicans on a solution.
But Ted Cruz just exposed why talks will go nowhere.
Cruz told reporters that the 80-year-old president’s response to the situation is a far cry from his performance during comparable debt-limit talks involving the Obama administration in 2011 — and that cognitive impairment is to blame.
“Vice President Biden sat down with House Republicans and reached a meaningful compromise,” the 52-year-old senator said.
“President Joe Biden needs to do the same thing.”
“Sadly, the reason he hasn’t so far, I believe, is because his mental faculties are too diminished right now to do what he did in 2011, to sit down and actually work together on a solution to the problem,” Cruz went on.
“What we’re left with is a bunch of young staffers in the White House — radical children — who are perfectly willing to risk a default on the debt because they have no appreciation of the chaos, and misery and damage a default would do.
“We should not default on our debt, but the present path we’re on is unsustainable,” Cruz concluded.
“And Joe Biden needs to come to the table.”
On the same day that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen suggested the US could default on its debt as soon as June 1, President Barack Obama called House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to the White House to discuss expanding the nation’s borrowing limit.
The president has also invited Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) to the May 9 meeting.
The House Republicans narrowly backed a measure last week to raise the US debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024, whichever comes first — but Schumer labeled it “dead on arrival” in the Senate.
The Limit, Save, and Grow Act would also limit federal spending growth to 1% each year for the following decade in order to reduce non-defense discretionary spending.
Senate Republicans said Wednesday that the cuts were “reasonable,” considering the trillions of dollars added to the national debt in only a few years, which now stands at more than $31 trillion.
“In 2019, before the pandemic, the federal government in total spent $4.4 trillion. In 2022, we spent $6.3 trillion,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
“President Biden in the next fiscal year wants to spend $6.9 trillion. This is a more than 50% increase over pre-pandemic levels.”
“In our initial discussions, fiscal conservatives — we wanted to go back to some kind of baseline based on fiscal year 2019, pre-pandemic. That’s not what the House passed,” he added.
“We went back to fiscal year 2022, $6.3 trillion. Do you understand the magnitude of that concession?”
Senator John Barrasso (R-Wyo.) reiterated Johnson’s concerns and urged Biden to return to the negotiation table.
“In the eight times that we raised the debt ceiling and have tied it to spending reforms, Joe Biden — either as a senator or a vice president — has supported six of those eight,” he said. “It is time for Joe Biden to end this debt ceiling madness.”
Stay tuned to The Federalist Wire.
