President Joe Biden addressed the debt ceiling Monday, two weeks ahead of an important deadline to either raise or not. The video above shows clips from President Biden’s address.
That deadline is Oct. 18. Last week, the Treasury Department said that is the date the department “will likely exhaust its extraordinary measures”, leaving it “with very limited resources that would be depleted quickly”.
Biden went after Republicans for not supporting raising the debt ceiling. “Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, they’re threatening to use the power, their power, to prevent us from doing our job, saving the economy from a catastrophic event,” Biden said. “I think, quite frankly, it’s hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful.”
A bill to raise the debt ceiling passed in the House last month. Senate Republican hesitancy has been lead by Minority Leader Mitch McConnell. He wrote a letter to Biden regarding the debt ceiling Monday.
In the letter, McConnell referred to the budget reconciliation process Democrats used to avoid a filibuster on Biden’s larger economic plan: “Bipartisanship is not a light switch that Speaker Pelosi and Leader Schumer may flip on to borrow money and flip off to spend it,” McConnell said in the letter. “Republicans’ position is simple. We have no lists of demands. For two and a half months, we have simply warned that since your party wishes to govern alone, it must handle the debt limit alone as well.”
The future of the debt ceiling, as well as the Biden economic agenda, remained in limbo Monday. Biden’s larger $3.5 trillion spending bill is being chiseled back to around $2 trillion, while final approval of the Senate-passed $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill is on hold.
