House Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) asked what all the drama was about after Republicans got nothing that they asked for in debt limit deal.
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Jayapal said on CNN’s State Of The Union:
You know I’m not a big fan of in-principle or frameworks. That’s always, you know, a problem if you can’t see the exact legislative texts. And we’re all trying to wade through spin right now. That’s certainly what you heard from my good colleague on the other side of the aisle, is a lot of spin. But I think it will come down to what the legislative text is.
At the end of the day, I think the American people have to understand, we’re at the brink of default, we don’t have a deal yet, we don’t know how many Republican votes can be produced, and it’s all because Republicans said that they wanted to cut the deficit. And let’s be clear that what they got from this was not that. They may have gotten other things. I’m not happy with some of the things I’m hearing about, but they are not cutting the deficit, and they are not cutting spending, because if you think about the fact that they’ve agreed to increase Pentagon spending, number one. They’ve agreed to increase VA spending, number two.
And while there are some fiscal, you know, calculations that are being made around what non-defense discretionary spending is. By the way, for people that are listening to that, that’s a lot of mumbo jumbo. That’s basic spending on things like education, health care, all the things you care about is what
Republicans want to cut. And they even took back $10 billion from the IRS that was supposed to go to taking on wealthy tax cheats in order to make regular Americans pay for wealthy people to be able to continue to get tax breaks.
So I think that, you know, you’ve got to ask yourself, what was all of the drama for? Because they didn’t get what they said they wanted. We knew that was never actually what was on the table.
House Republicans and Kevin McCarthy should be judged by the standard of the debt limit bill that they passed. Using their own metric that the House GOP claimed was their bottom line, they got rolled by President Biden.
The House GOP didn’t get their 20% spending cut across the board. Instead, they agreed to a spending freeze that was proposed by the White House. They got a token work requirement that will impact less than 10% of SNAP recipients, which Rep. Jayapal correctly criticized later in the CNN interview as a bad policy that doesn’t reduce the deficit. Republicans did get $10 billion back in the increased IRS funding, but Biden still increased funding to the IRS to go after wealthy tax cheats by $80 billion.
So what was all of this drama really about?
House Republicans didn’t get anything that they wanted and are now trying to sell defeat as victory.
Jason is the managing editor. He is also a White House Press Pool and a Congressional correspondent for PoliticusUSA. Jason has a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science. His graduate work focused on public policy, with a specialization in social reform movements.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association