Speaking to reporters after an event in New York Wednesday afternoon, President Joe Biden indicated he's willing to push aside his demands for a "clean" debt ceiling increase and negotiate spending cuts with lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
"Do you feel more optimistic about a deal today that you did yesterday?" a reporter asked.
"Sure," Biden responded, adding that he wants to look at specific spending cuts Democrats and Republicans can agree on.
But he also threatened to become a tyrant and rule without consulting Congress:
But Tuesday night, Biden also refused to rule out taking unilateral action to raise the debt limit.
In April Republicans passed legislation lifting the debt limit by $1.5 trillion while also capping federal spending at 2022 levels. In addition, the bill claws back billions in unused pandemic relief funding. The White House says they want to avoid a debt default. Republicans have passed a bill doing exactly that.
Until yesterday, the White House indicated they were willing to default with hopes Republicans would take the political blame and again demanded the debt limit be lifted without spending cuts attached.
Biden is claiming that he can raise the debt limit on his own authority, despite the Constitution making Congress the branch with the power to appropriate moneys and direct how they will be spent.
Joe Biden had a meeting with Republican and Democratic leaders about the debt ceiling on Tuesday, but they did not come to any agreements and there was no new movement in the negotiations, apart from Biden finally getting off his duff, out of the basement, and meeting with them.
As my colleague Bob Hoge explained:
McCarthy has offered a budget proposal that would trade spending cuts for an increased borrowing limit, but Biden has shown little interest in negotiating. The president has his own budget proposal: a $6.9 trillion behemoth that would spend $1.8 trillion more than the government would take in. He claims that massive new taxes would make up the difference and even lower the deficit.
In other words, Biden wants to keep on spending like it's going out of style, despite how that spending has already led to record inflation and crushing the pocketbooks of Americans. The claim that somehow massive new taxes will enable him to continue to spend is madness. Once again, if he was trying to drive us off a cliff, what would he be doing differently? Not a heck of a whole lot.
After the meeting, Biden took a few questions from reporters and revealed just how delusional he truly is on the subject. A reporter asked about Biden making any budget cuts in what he was proposing, saying House Speaker Kevin McCarthy had not gotten any answers from him about any cuts. Biden got mad that the reporter had the temerity to ask such a question and snapped at her.
Biden claimed that he'd given McCarthy a specific answer, but said to the reporter, "You didn't listen either, so why should I even answer the question?" Translation: he didn't have an answer, he wasn't proposing any cuts. It's his budget, it's up to him to propose cuts, not McCarthy. All Biden did was insist that he had cut the deficit, "We cut the deficit by $160 billion! Billion! B-I-L-L-I-O-N."
Biden's already been hit with a "bottomless Pinocchio" for his constant lying about cutting the deficit from the Washington Post.
See Nick Arama at RedState for even the Propaganda Outlet the Washington Post repeatedly calling Biden a liar on this point. His budgets were fake. Most budgets are, but his were faker than usual. Rather than shrinking the deficit, they increased it.
Even the Washington Post feels compelled to call him out on these serial lies.
And yet this demented rapist and traitor keeps telling them.
Biden is claiming that he has the power to issue government debt on his own authority, making himself a tyrant unanswerable to Congress, stealing from Congress its most foundational power of appropriating money.
The amendment, ratified in the aftermath of the Civil War, is better known for its provisions addressing citizenship and equal protection under the law. It has been used by the Supreme Court to mandate racial integration in schools in Brown v. Board of Education and same-sex marriage recognition in Obergefell v. Hodges.
It also includes this clause, which some legal scholars see as relevant to today's showdown: "The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."
Default, they argue, is therefore unconstitutional and Biden would have a duty to effectively nullify the debt limit if Congress won't raise it, so that the validity of the country's debt isn't questioned.
The man putting the debt into question is Joe Biden himself. He should invoke the 14th Amendment to overrule his insistence that he can continue spending us into a full-on depression.