Biden ‘too diminished’ mentally to talk debt ceiling: Sen. Ted Cruz
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said Wednesday that President Biden has doomed negotiations with House Republicans over the debt ceiling because of his impaired mental state.
Cruz told reporters the 80-year-old president’s approach to the crisis is a far cry from his performance during similar debt limit talks involving the Obama White House in 2011 — and suggested cognitive decline was to blame.
“Vice President Biden sat down with House Republicans and reached a meaningful compromise,” the 52-year-old senator said.
“President Joe Biden needs to do the same thing.”
“Sadly, the reason he hasn’t so far, I believe, is because his mental faculties are too diminished right now to do what he did in 2011, to sit down and actually work together on a solution to the problem,” Cruz went on.
“What we’re left with is a bunch of young staffers in the White House — radical children — who are perfectly willing to risk a default on the debt because they have no appreciation of the chaos, and misery and damage a default would do.
“We should not default on our debt, but the present path we’re on is unsustainable,” Cruz concluded.
“And Joe Biden needs to come to the table.”
On Monday, the president invited House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) to the White House to discuss raising the nation’s borrowing limit — the same day that Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said the US could default on its debt as soon as June 1.
The president has also included Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) in the discussion, which is set to take place on May 9.
House Republicans last week narrowly passed a proposal to raise the US debt ceiling by $1.5 trillion or until March 31, 2024, whichever is reached first — but Schumer declared it “dead on arrival” in the Senate.
The bill, known as the Limit, Save, Grow Act, would also cap the growth of federal expenditures to 1% per year for the next decade to shrink non-defense discretionary spending.
Senate Republicans argued Wednesday the cuts were “reasonable,” given the trillions of dollars that have been added in just a few years to the national debt, which currently stands at over $31 trillion.
“In 2019, before the pandemic, the federal government in total spent $4.4 trillion. In 2022, we spent $6.3 trillion,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.).
“President Biden in the next fiscal year wants to spend $6.9 trillion. That’s more than a 50% increase over pre-pandemic levels.”
“In our initial discussions, fiscal conservatives — we wanted to go back to some kind of baseline based on fiscal year 2019, pre-pandemic. That’s not what the House passed,” he added.
“We went back to fiscal year 2022, $6.3 trillion. Do you understand the magnitude of that concession?”
Senate Republican Conference Chair John Barrasso (Wyo.) echoed Johnson’s concern and called on Biden to come to the negotiating table.
“In the eight times that we raised the debt ceiling and have tied it to spending reforms, Joe Biden — either as a senator or a vice president — has supported six of those eight,” he said. “It is time for Joe Biden to end this debt ceiling madness.”
