1 year ago
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Good news! The nation will not go into default next Monday. President Joe Biden used his decades of negotiating skills, which he honed in the Senate, to come out of the deal as the winner. Even Peter Baker, the often cynical, snark-filled reporter for The New York Times, conceded that Biden was “the calm man in the capital” who bested House Speaker Kevin McCarthy. Baker notes Biden was able to accomplish this win by downplaying his achievements, “in striking contrast to his negotiating partner, [...] McCarthy, who has been running all over the Capitol in recent days asserting that the deal was a ‘historic’ victory for fiscal conservatives.”
The bargain Biden made gave McCarthy a win as well: diluting the power of the Freedom Caucus. While the group of far-right lawmakers might have played kingmaker with McCarthy during his tortuous five-day, 15-vote path to the speakership, they couldn’t prevail over the majority of their colleagues who didn’t want to follow them over the cliff into default. For all their histrionics over McCarthy’s betrayal, their revolt didn’t so much fizzle as entirely fail to ignite. Not only did they fail to bring any Republicans to their side, they didn’t even achieve consensus in their own ranks. Some of them even voted for the deal, and the one or two calls for McCarthy’s speakership to be challenged have fallen flat. McCarthy comes out of this owing the Freedom Caucus nothing.
In fact, McCarthy comes out of this owing Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and the Democrats, whose votes gave him a comfortable win in the House on this bill. While he managed to get a majority vote from his Republicans, more Democrats than Republicans supported the bill—165 of them. Where the Democrats really stepped up, though, was in the procedural vote on the rule that moved the deal to the floor. The Hill described the drama as the minutes ticked down and the rule was failing.
