Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich believes President Joe Biden’s meeting with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy regarding the debt ceiling crisis was framed as a start of negotiations while the issue should have been non-negotiable.
While the President and the Speaker agreed to continue the conversation, and McCarthy said the two of them could find common ground, there were no signs of an immediate breakthrough, reported Reuters.
"The president and I had a good first meeting," McCarthy told reporters following the more-than-hour-long meeting, according to Reuters.
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In an article titled ‘Today's Biden-McCarthy meeting: A "framing" victory for McCarthy and the GOP’ published on Substack, Reich pointed out that the meeting reinforced McCarthy’s and the Republicans’ message that raising the debt ceiling is a negotiable issue that should be dealt with by reducing spending.
While citing some media reports, Reich highlighted a report by Politico which said Biden officials, in the run-up to the meeting, privately discussed the possibility of a compromise.
‘Compromise? Concessions? We’re already at the negotiating table, folks,’ Reich noted.
Trump-era debt: The former labor secretary also noted that the media should do a better job of reporting the debt ceiling crisis while noting some of the Trump-era highlights which he thought were missing in the coverage of the issue.
“But where’s the reporting of the enormous $7.8 trillion debt racked up by Trump and his Republican Congress? Or the willingness of Republicans to raise the debt ceiling three times under Trump? Or the fact that Republican-sponsored tax cuts on big corporations and the rich substantially worsened the debt?” he questioned.
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