House Speaker Kevin McCarthy defended his debt ceiling agreement Sunday after objections arose from conservative lawmakers who believe McCarthy did not get enough concessions from Democrats.
Speaker McCarthy appeared on “Fox News Sunday” to discuss his Saturday night agreement with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling. He was asked by host Shannon Bream about Republican North Carolina Rep. Dan Bishop’s criticism of the debt ceiling deal. (RELATED: Kevin McCarthy, Joe Biden Reach Debt Ceiling Agreement)
“Heard the call. RINOs congratulating McCarthy for getting almost zippo in exchange for $4T debt ceiling hike was enough to make you [vomit]. (Actually, it’s so bad they won’t give a figure for the debt ceiling hike … only that it’s suspended til Q1 2025. Our bill was a year less.),” Bishop tweeted Saturday.
“We finally were able to cut spending. We were the first Congress to vote for cutting spending year over year. So you cut that back, you fully fund the veterans, you fully fund defense, but you take that non-defense spending all the way back lower than ’22 levels. Now you get work requirements for TANF and SNAP, where the Democrats said that was a red line. Now you’re able to reform NEPA … we’re going to get America working again. We get the process working again, where we always had these omnibuses at the end of the year. We now penalize Congress if they don’t get their jobs done. There is so much in this that’s positive,” McCarthy said.
“We were able to do this when the President said he wasn’t even going to talk to us. This is really a step in the right direction, it puts us [on] a trajectory that’s different, we put a statutory cap on only spending 1% for the next six years, so we let government grow but at a slower rate.”
The debt ceiling deal between the Biden administration and Speaker McCarthy will roll back non-defense discretionary spending to fiscal year 2022 levels and cap federal spending increases to one percent per year over a six-year period, according to a fact sheet sent out to Congressional Republicans.
Additional provisions in the deal include work requirements for welfare recipients, restarting student loan payments, cutting IRS funding, fully funding veterans’ programs and permitting reform to streamline energy and infrastructure projects.