The measure, which passed the House by a vote of 217-215, is widely perceived as having no chance of passing the Senate, where Democrats have a slim majority.
Emmer didn’t explain why he thought Senate Democrats other than Manchin might come to embrace the legislation.
If no agreement is reached, the nation would bump up against its debt ceiling, which is now projected to happen in July, and default on its debts. President Joe Biden has said he is willing to negotiate over the nation’s budget, but wants the debt limit raised independently of those talks, without any conditions, as occurred during the Trump administration. Most Capitol Hill Democrats have said the same thing.
Emmer said no negotiations are needed: The Senate could simply approve the House GOP bill and Biden could sign it.
“Our recommendation is: We passed it through the House; take it up in the Senate and pass it,” Emmer said.
As he tried to redirect the narrative on the legislation, Emmer also rejected the idea that the bill was built on spending cuts, referring instead to “spending reforms.”
“I take a little issue, Dana, with the cuts language that the media likes to use all the time,” the Minnesota Republican told host Dana Bash. “This is a transformational bill. It would limit spending.”
Speaking later on the same CNN program, former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) said he didn’t see much hope that the debt crisis would be resolved quickly or easily.
“I’m really concerned about the debt limit when we approach it,” Kinzinger said.
[ad_2]
#House #majority #whip #rejects #idea #GOP #debt #bill #doomed
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
LONDON — Joe Biden is not someone known for his subtlety.
His gaffe-prone nature — which saw him last week confuse the New Zealand rugby team with British forces from the Irish War of Independence — leaves little in the way of nuance.
But he is also a sentimental man from a long gone era of Washington, who specializes in a type of homespun, aw-shucks affability that would be seen as naff in a younger president.
His lack of subtlety was on show in Belfast last week as he issued a thinly veiled ultimatum to the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) — return to Northern Ireland’s power sharing arrangements or risk losing billions of dollars in U.S. business investment.
The DUP — a unionist party that does not take kindly to lectures from American presidents — is refusing to sit in Stormont, the Northern Ireland Assembly, due to its anger with the post-Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which has created trade friction between the region and the rest of the U.K.
The DUP is also refusing to support the U.K.-EU Windsor Framework, which aims to fix the economic problems created by the protocol, despite hopes it would see the party reconvene the Northern Irish Assembly.
The president on Wednesday urged Northern Irish leaders to “unleash this incredible economic opportunity, which is just beginning.”
However, American business groups paint a far more complex and nuanced view of future foreign investment into Northern Ireland than offered up by Biden.
Biden told a Belfast crowd on Wednesday there were “scores of major American corporations wanting to come here” to invest, but that a suspended Stormont was acting as a block on that activity.
One U.S. business figure, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Biden’s flighty rhetoric was “exaggerated” and that many businesses would be looking beyond the state of the regional assembly to make their investment decisions.
The president spoke as if Ulster would be rewarded with floods of American greenbacks if the DUP reverses its intransigence, predicting that Northern Ireland’s gross domestic product (GDP) would soon be triple its 1998 level. Its GDP is currently around double the size of when the Good Friday Agreement was struck in 1998.
Emanuel Adam, executive director of BritishAmerican Business, said this sounded like a “magic figure” unless Biden “knows something we don’t know about.”
DUP MP Ian Paisley Jr. told POLITICO that U.S. politicians for “too long” have “promised some economic El Dorado or bonanza if you only do what we say politically … but that bonanza has never arrived and people are not naive enough here to believe it ever will.”
“A presidential visit is always welcome, but the glitter on top is not an economic driver,” he said.
Joe Biden addresses a crowd of thousands on April 14, 2023 in Ballina, Ireland | Charles McQuillan/Getty Images
Facing both ways
The British government is hoping the Windsor Framework will ease economic tensions in Northern Ireland and create politically stable conditions for inward foreign direct investment.
The framework removes many checks on goods going from Great Britain to Northern Ireland and has begun to slowly create a more collaborative relationship between London and Brussels on a number of fronts — two elements which have been warmly welcomed across the Atlantic.
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market, to avoid a hard border with the Republic of Ireland, and the U.K.’s internal market.
“That’s like the world’s most exciting economic zone,” Sunak said in February.
Jake Colvin, head of Washington’s National Foreign Trade Council business group, said U.S. firms wanted to see “confidence that the frictions over the protocol have indeed been resolved.”
“Businesses will look to mechanisms like the Windsor Framework to provide stability,” he said.
Marjorie Chorlins, senior vice president for Europe at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said the Windsor Framework was “very important” for U.S. businesses and that “certainty about the relationship between the U.K. and the EU is critical.”
She said a reconvened Stormont would mean more legislative stability on issues like skills and healthcare, but added that there were a whole range of other broader U.K. wide economic factors that will play a major part in investment decisions.
This is particularly salient in a week where official figures showed the U.K.’s GDP flatlining and predictions that Britain will be the worst economic performer in the G20 this year.
“We want to see a return to robust growth and prosperity for the U.K. broadly and are eager to work with government at all levels,” Chorlins said.
“Political and economic instability in the U.K. has been a challenge for businesses of all sizes.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said Northern Ireland is in a “special” position of having access to the EU’s single market | Pool photo by Paul Faith/Getty Images
Her words underline just how much global reputational damage last year’s carousel of prime ministers caused for the U.K., with Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey recently warning of a “hangover effect” from Liz Truss’ premiership and the broader Westminster psychodrama of 2022.
America’s Northern Ireland envoy Joe Kennedy, grandson of Robert Kennedy, accompanied the president last week and has been charged with drumming up U.S. corporate interest in Northern Ireland.
Kennedy said Northern Ireland is already “the number-one foreign investment location for proximity and market access.”
Northern Ireland has been home to £1.5 billion of American investment in the past decade and had the second-most FDI projects per capita out of all U.K. regions in 2021.
Claire Hanna, Westminster MP for the nationalist SDLP, believes reconvening Stormont would “signal a seriousness that there isn’t going to be anymore mucking around.”
“It’s also about the signal that the restoration of Stormont sends — that these are the accepted trading arrangements,” she said.
Hanna says the DUP’s willingness to “demonize the two biggest trading blocs in the world — the U.S. and EU” — was damaging to the country’s future economic prospects.
‘The money goes south’
At a more practical level, Biden’s ultimatum appears to carry zero weight with DUP representatives.
DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson made it clear last week that he was unmoved by Biden’s economic proclamations and gave no guarantee his party would sit in the regional assembly in the foreseeable future.
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson told POLITICO.
“But fundamental to the success of our economy is our ability to trade within our biggest market, which is of course the United Kingdom.”
A DUP official said U.S. governments had been promising extra American billions in exchange “for selling out to Sinn Féin and Dublin” since the 1990s and “when America talks about corporate investment, we get the crumbs and that investment really all ends up in the Republic [of Ireland].”
“President Biden is offering the hope of further American investment, which we always welcome,” Donaldson said | Behal/Irish Government via Getty Images
“The Americans talk big, but the money goes south,” the DUP official said.
This underscores the stark reality that challenges Northern Ireland any time it pitches for U.S. investment — the competing proposition offered by its southern neighbor with its internationally low 12.5 percent rate on corporate profits.
Emanuel Adam with BritishAmerican Business said there was a noticeable feeling in Washington that firms want to do business in Dublin.
“When [Irish Prime Minister] Leo Varadkar and his team were here recently, I could tell how confident the Irish are these days,” he said. “There are not as many questions for them as there are around the U.K.”
Biden’s economic ultimatum looks toothless from the DUP’s perspective and its resonance may be as short-lived as his trip to Belfast itself.
This story has been updatedto correct an historical reference.
[ad_2]
#Bidens #Northern #Ireland #ultimatum #doomed #fail
( With inputs from : www.politico.eu )
“There’s the potential for it to be very bad,” said Kamin, who did a stint as a top Biden economic staffer before returning to academia last year. “We’re back here, and there’s a real risk to the economy on the line.”
Kamin isn’t the only one struck by a foreboding sense of déjà vu. From the White House to Wall Street, a growing number of veterans of the 2011 debt ceiling crisis are again watching a story of bluster and brinkmanship play out — and are terrified this will be the time it ends with the country in financial ruin.
“It feels like there’s a desire to get closer and closer to the brink,” said David Vandivier, who was a senior Treasury official during the 2011 negotiations. “At a certain point, you don’t know where the line is.”
The parallels to the Obama-era stalemate are clear, as House Republican leaders vow to place restraints on a Democratic administration, while also trying to manage their troublesome conservative wing.
But unlike in 2011, Republicans are preparing to stare down the White House with no clear consensus on what they want in exchange for keeping the U.S. financial system afloat. The prevailing principle, instead, appears to be extracting a degree of political pain for President Joe Biden. And perhaps most worryingly — Democrats, economists and even some Republicans say — there’s little confidence that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has the influence to successfully steer his conference away from the brink.
“I wish I could look at this, having been through a bunch of these, and say there’s going to be a bunch of drama but this is how it gets resolved,” said Brendan Buck, an aide to then-GOP House Speaker John Boehner during the 2011 debt negotiations. “But I don’t know how this gets resolved. There are just huge obstacles here [that] I don’t think were quite as problematic in 2011.”
Or as Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) put it: “I think these people are nuts, and they’re serious.”
Dan Pfeiffer, a senior Obama aide during the 2011 showdown, said that of his entire time in the administration, he was never more scared than in the final days of that debt ceiling fight, “because it was very possible we were going over the cliff.”
For him, the similarities to now are obvious: a Democratic president unsure if the leader of the opposing party has the “clout” to get his conference on the same page. But the White House, at the time, felt Boehner understood and took seriously the dangers of default.
“Boehner may have been willing to put more of his ass on the line. He did intellectually and substantively understand why default was terrible,” Pfeiffer said. “I’m not sure that McCarthy understands that, that McCarthy cares, that McCarthy would value the full faith and credit of the United States over his own job.”
The U.S. has never intentionally defaulted on its debt, a track record that has made its Treasury securities a safe haven for investors globally and allowed the government to borrow money at low interest rates.
There is universal consensus that a debt ceiling breach would be a historic catastrophe. Interest rates would skyrocket and the stock market would tank. The economy would spiral into a recession, shaking consumer confidence and decimating the nation’s financial credibility on the world stage. The impact could ripple across the globe, prompting debt crunches in lower-income countries with foreign currency reserves held in a suddenly weaker U.S. dollar.
At the Treasury Department, officials would be forced to prioritize what payments it could make to bondholders — a logistical challenge the government has never attempted before, and one sure to invite blowback for funneling money to foreign investors while Social Security and other benefits go unfunded.
“You’re shaking the bedrock of the global financial system to the core,” said Mark Zandi, the longtime chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, who projects that just a few weeks of default would double the unemployment rate and wipe out $12 trillion in household wealth.
The severity of those consequences has so far offered some comfort on Capitol Hill and in company boardrooms, where the belief is that the cost of failure is so high that the parties can’t afford not to reach a deal. Since the 2011 standoff, Congress has raised or suspended the debt ceiling nine times, three of which came under former President Donald Trump.
“America’s not going to default on its debt. There are going to be a lot of stories and gnawing and gnashing of teeth in the media about what’s going to happen,” said McCarthy ally and former Rep. Rodney Davis (R-Ill).
Though the possibility of default is still several months away, Biden has signaled plans to meet with McCarthy on the issue, though the White House has said he will merely reiterate his current position that the debt ceiling is not subject to negotiation. In both the administration and Republican leadership, officials have begun privately gaming out endgame scenarios.
Democrats believe that cutting discretionary spending will prove deeply unpopular with the public once Republicans pinpoint the programs they’d slash. That, in turn, will force Republicans to moderate their demands. Within the GOP, there’s widespread belief the White House will eventually drop its “no negotiation” stance and seek a bipartisan resolution.
“The administration and the Senate needs to realize Kevin’s serious,” Davis said. “He’s serious about having this discussion [about spending cuts].”
The White House declined to comment for this article, though officials have previously said that while Biden won’t negotiate over the debt ceiling, he’s open to discussing broader fiscal policies.
McCarthy spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said the speaker looked forward to discussing a “responsible debt ceiling increase” with Biden, and added the White House should be open to negotiating “how we can put America on a sounder fiscal path by finally addressing irresponsible government spending.”
But whenever that meeting does happen, few expect Biden and McCarthy to find any common ground. The White House has shrugged off concerns about its spending, buoyed by what it sees as the successful role its trillion-dollar relief Covid-relief plan played in accelerating the economic recovery.
McCarthy, meanwhile, may struggle to find a set of spending cuts that can satisfy his own conference, much less win support across the aisle. Some Republicans have floated a range of proposals targeting programs like Medicare and Social Security, even as McCarthy and Trump have publicly dismissed the idea of touching entitlements.
Though the Republican party is focused on securing sharp funding reductions across government, there’s no agreement so far on how much or where exactly they should come from. Some, like Rep. Andy Biggs (R-Ariz.), have questioned the need to raise the debt ceiling at all.
“It’s scary because with everything that McCarthy has given away to his right wing, he may have restricted his range of motion in ways that are going to be very dangerous,” said Sen. Michael Bennet (D-Colo.).
In the interim, many of the 2011 veterans have spent recent weeks emphasizing the gravity of the situation to anyone who will listen, fearful that every week that goes by without progress ups the odds of a disastrous outcome.
“This time,” said Zandi, “it feels different to me. It feels much more dysfunctional.”
[ad_2]
#Veterans #Obamaera #debt #ceiling #standoff #current #doomed
( With inputs from : www.politico.com )
