10 months ago
38
We begin today with the first of two big stories starting with Tony Romm, Theodoric Meyer, Leigh Ann Caldwell, and Mariana Sotomayor of The Washington Post reporting that a tentative deal has been reached regarding the debt ceiling between Speaker Kevin McCarthy and President Joe Biden.
The agreement offers Congress a road map for averting a fiscal crisis: It preserves the country’s ability to borrow money into 2025, resets the budgets at a broad swath of federal agencies and institutes new work requirements on some Americans who receive federal nutrition assistance known as food stamps.
The full details were not immediately clear Saturday night, as lawmakers had yet to introduce any legislative text. But it arrives more than four months after Republicans assumed control of the House in January and plotted a strategy to leverage the debt ceiling to achieve their policy agenda — ignoring repeated warnings that their brinkmanship could plunge the country into a recession.
The fate of the deal now rests in the hands of a restive Congress, where Democrats and Republicans began raising objections hours before their leaders struck their bargain. The blowback underscores the difficult task Biden and McCarthy face to muscle any legislation through the pitfall-prone, narrowly divided House and Senate with roughly a week to spare.
