As March drew to a close with the Biden White House still steadfastly refusing to negotiate with Republicans ahead of a forthcoming deadline to hike the debt ceiling, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy issued an ultimatum. The Republican conference in the House was “very close” to consensus on the spending cuts it would like to see in exchange for an increase in the nation’s borrowing limit, “and if the president doesn’t act,” McCarthy added, “we will.”

Biden and congressional Democrats ignored McCarthy’s threat. So, two weeks later, the speaker signaled his intention to pull the trigger on his proposition, even though the consensus he said was forming among Republicans didn’t appear to exist.

In a speech on Monday at the New York Stock Exchange, McCarthy heaped scorn on Joe Biden and his party for refusing to negotiate with House Republicans, inviting “the first default in our nation’s history” in the process. The speaker reiterated the fact that his conference would not accept a “no-strings-attached debt-limit increase,” but he also outlined for the first time what would get the GOP to a “yes” on a debt-limit hike.

Per Roll Call:

• Capping next year’s spending at fiscal 2022 levels and limiting spending growth over the following decade to 1 percent annually while ensuring “our veterans and our servicemembers are taken care of.”
• Clawing back tens of billions of dollars in unspent pandemic funding.
• Boosting domestic energy production with provisions from a package the House already passed.
• Implementing work requirements for able-bodied adults without dependents to receive certain federal benefits.

Much of this is unobjectionable. Few but the most pathological spendthrifts would object to the reclamation of unspent federal relief funding for a disaster that is long over. Likewise, McCarthy has moved in the Democrats’ direction by conceding to discretionary spending caps at post-pandemic levels. It’s possible to make a budgetary argument in favor of domestic energy production and work requirements for those accessing government services, but the audience for that sort of thing is limited to the Congressional Budget Office.

In general, these are politically sound proposals, but this is not a plan that even approaches the restoration of fiscal sanity. McCarthy is looking for a face-saving off-ramp from the impending debt-ceiling crisis. The White House will not give him one.

“There is one responsible solution to the debt limit,” said White House Deputy Press Secretary Andrew Bates, “addressing it promptly, without brinkmanship or hostage-taking.” This incendiary language harkens back to the Obama years, when a delusion took hold of the Democratic Party: the idea that the GOP had gotten everything it wanted out of debt negotiations that followed the GOP’s 2010 midterm-election victories, and that Democrats should do everything in their power to avoid being rolled again.

This narrative would bewilder Republican voters, for whom the GOP has done little more than lose in the decade preceding Donald Trump’s ascent to the political stage. Bates’s rhetorical flourish — the “hostage-taking” nonsense — is another tell.

It’s never “hostage-taking” when Democrats use the power provided to them by voters in legitimate elections to achieve their objectives. Democrats don’t strong-arm; they “perfect the art of delay” when they balk at confirming Trump’s nominees. They deal an “embarrassing” blow to the GOP when they block funding for intelligence-gathering programs and veterans’ health care to protest the lack of an investigation into Russia’s alleged 2016 election-meddling. It’s just sharp-elbowed politics when Democrats block Republicans from passing Covid-relief funding amid an acute emergency or put the Pentagon budget on hold to prevent the appropriation of border-security funds. And so on.

This litany of generational grievances sets the stage for a standoff in which neither side has the will to budge. Still, Democrats may be correct about the mechanics of this particular impasse. It’s hard to see how McCarthy unites the GOP behind his plan and forces the party in control of the White House to throw him a bone.

Asked whether he can bring his conference to support his debt-hike plan (the language of which has yet to be crafted into a bill), McCarthy sounded a note of ambiguity. “I think I have the support of America,” he said. “I’ll get the party behind it.”

According to the Washington Post’s reporting, the speaker’s style of leadership gets high marks from many of the House GOP’s members, but many are not yet sold on his debt-ceiling plan. Some Republicans want to see real budget cuts that address the primary drivers of the nation’s debt. Others don’t. Some want to avoid the prospect of tinkering with the nation’s popular anti-poverty programs, such as Medicaid. Others want to see even broader work requirements attached to those programs. And a handful of GOP lawmakers won’t vote to raise the debt limit under any circumstances.

Given the party’s razor-thin majority in the lower chamber of Congress, these conflicting priorities threaten to split the conference and jeopardize any initiative. Some Republicans who are a “maybe” today might fall in line when a debt-ceiling proposal comes to a vote, but the math looks dicey for McCarthy. If the standoff stretches into the eleventh hour, Republicans may benefit from the public perception that the White House is being recalcitrant over something as petty as, say, the preserving of aid for a pandemic that is behind us. But that doesn’t seem likely if the Democratic Party presents a united front while the GOP dissolves into internecine public squabbling.

Ultimately, the calculation that the Biden White House is making may prove correct. McCarthy may be unable to unite his conference around a face-saving deal to raise the debt ceiling, forcing the party to rely on the Democratic votes that Representative Tom Cole has already said the GOP will “absolutely” need to get a debt-limit hike through to the Democrat-controlled Senate. What becomes of McCarthy’s already tenuous speakership in that event is anyone’s guess, but I wouldn’t bet on a long tenure for the speaker.