Biden set to meet with Hill leaders Tuesday on debt limit
Now sources tell NBC News that President Biden is going to be meeting tomorrow with four congressional leaders to talk about the debt limit. It's going to be the last meeting before Biden leaves for the G7 summit for the next eight days. So let's bring in right now NBC News senior national political reporter, Sahil Kapoor, live from Capitol Hill. Sahil staffs for Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met over the weekend. What progress did they make? Well, Joe, they're running into a familiar dilemma that now looms as potentially the biggest hurdle to resolving this debt limit crisis ahead of that big meeting between President Biden and congressional leaders later this week. Specifically, the problem is this question of how you allocate funding between the military and non-military spending. You've got a situation where House Republicans in the majority want major cuts in the federal budget, but they don't want to cut defense spending.
They want to focus all the cuts on the non-military slice of the budget, which is simply not going to fly with Democrats. Let's put up two quotes that show this. There's Congressman Tom Cole, the House Republican, says threats set defense spending. Domestic priorities, he argues, are wants and desires, but you don't necessarily get everything. Then there's Senator Ben Cardin, a member of the Democratic Senate majority, who told me, quote, there is certain parity between defense and non-defense, and that's an issue that's important in our caucus. Now, it's unclear how this gets resolved, Joe, because the spending cap is the central piece that House Republicans are demanding in order to prevent a catastrophic debt default. I've talked to some insiders about how this could be resolved.
Some have suggested simply a spending freeze at existing levels, so you avoid the question of cuts, whether to cut one slice more than the other. There's a question of maybe a short-term cap that you could do for just a year. Some have suggested you focus on policies. You pair it with savings and growth policies and take the heat off the spending cap number, or they could simply not agree on a number, which would be a major retreat for House conservatives. It's hard to see how that figures. Meanwhile, anxieties are rising about the potential of the first ever debt default. Let's have a listen to what Senator Chris Murphy, the Democrat, said on Meet the Press yesterday.
Well, what worries me is that Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, even Mitch McConnell, have said that if we can't get an agreement in the next few weeks, default is off the table. The only leader who says we are going to light the American economy on fire if we can't get an agreement in the next 10 to 14 days is Kevin McCarthy. And that is deeply worrying to me because there's an opportunity to talk about their really unpopular agenda of cuts. But the time to do that is when we're negotiating the budget. And if there is no deal, guys, that potentially catastrophic debt default could be as little as two and a half weeks away. Jonathan, Joe. NBC Sahil Kapoor, thank you so much for your reporting.
And Claire McCaskill-Clock is ticking. President Biden is scheduled to leave later this week for the G7 in Japan. It's a trip of a week or more. Aides are saying, planning on making the G7 stop, but they acknowledge that the back half of that trip, which would be to Australia and Papua New Guinea, that might go away if a deal can't get reached. The deadline is on the horizon. And so staffers say they've made a little bit of progress, but the main event is going to be tomorrow when the big four leaders, the president, meet at the White House. The last one was pretty contentious.
What are you, how do you see this playing out this week? Well, I think Biden has been smart by trying to taunt and push and prod McCarthy into actually showing budget numbers. You know, they did really a coward thing, a cowardly thing. What they did is said, oh, we're going to cut stuff, but they didn't say what they were going to cut. And once you say what you're going to cut, then people get upset and embraced in their proposal is cuts to programs like veterans benefits, like health care, like Medicare, Medicaid, things that the American public is really not going to support. So if they can at least get McCarthy to say, hey, you want to cut stuff, show us what you're going to cut before we go any farther. And then I think they're going to end up in a position where they give McCarthy a fig leaf. They maybe do freeze for a year.
They maybe do minimal cuts across the board. But I do think they'll come up with a deal. And I do think they will avoid a default because I think McCarthy understands. The political problem he's got, if he is the one that lights the economy on fire. Yeah, I agree with you, Claire. I mean, I've been through a few of these. You've been through a few of these.
They usually at the end of the day, the pressure is too strong on them coming from all sides to ever let the United States default. We'll see, though, if that's the case here or not.
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