Manchin, Capito say deal should be worked out on debt ceiling

Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., both said Thursday they are confident the nation will not default on its debt and some sort of spending limits will be worked out.

Manchin said during a virtual press briefing that raising the debt ceiling “has to be done,” but spending limits to address the growing national debt, which is now more than the $31 trillion limit set in January, also have to be in place.

“For 21 years in a row the U.S. government has spent more than it has taken in,” he said. “We cannot survive like that. No one can survive like that. Something must be done.”

“Defaulting on our obligations is something that we absolutely cannot do,” Capito said during her virtual press briefing Thursday. “We have to reach a compromise. And to reach a compromise you have to have to have negotiations.”

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the House Republicans passed legislation to include spending limits before the debt ceiling is once again raised and asked Pres. Joe Biden to engage in talks to reach a compromise on those spending limits.

However, until this week, Biden has refused to do so, saying there will be no negotiations related to lifting the limit, and continues to maintain that is the case.

On Monday, faced with a new timeline for possible default at June 1, Biden sought to meet with McCarthy, Sen. Mitch McConnell (Senate Minority Leader), Sen. Chuck Schumer (Senate Majority leader) and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (House Minority Leader) next Tuesday.

Capito said that Biden previously said he would not negotiate because House Republicans did not have a plan in place, but now they do.

“They have a plan,” she said. “You have to have negotiations. When you negotiate you bring in the other side … Biden now says he will negotiate.”

The provisions in the House plan, called the Limit, Save, Grow Act, include leaving the federal budget as it is for the current fiscal year, capping federal agencies’ future budgets at 1 percent growth for the next decade, blocking student debt cancellations, reducing some of the $80 billion earmarked for the IRS and repealing some provisions related to tax policies on renewables and electric vehicles.

Manchin said the federal budget had been increasing during the COVID years to deal with that national crisis, so the budget should be able to handle the status quo next year and a 1 percent cap on increases for agencies.

“We had unprecedented spending during the pandemic,” he said because the country initially did not know what it was facing and a lot of money was “thrown at it,” a practice that should have ended after the vaccine saw widespread availability.

Now that everything is back to normal, how things were with the budget before the pandemic should be examined, he said, with the 2022 budget (the current one that ends on Sept. 30) the “high water mark” of spending.

It is not a matter of cuts, he said. Rather, it is a matter of avoiding more debt with a long-range plan to cut the national debt by curtailing spending.

“I am not supporting cuts, I am supporting controlling spending,” he said. “We have got to get back to where we had fiduciary responsibility.”

But that is not easy.

“That is not how government works if they can keep sucking more out,” he said.

Capito said she agrees with a scenario that basically includes some compromises and everyone wins politically.

“I think Speaker McCarthy made it clear that a clean debt ceiling (no negotiations) cannot pass the House,” she said. “So I think there has to be some concessions.”

“No clean debt ceiling, no tax increases, COVID dollars (recovering unspent funds), a limit on future spending and a permitting piece (federal permitting reform) satisfies me, I think, without seeing the details of it,” she said of a possible compromise.

Capito said McCarthy has to get to that “critical number” to receive enough support in the House for a compromise to pass.

“In my view, the way the President declares victory is, ‘We didn’t default. I negotiated. I am the leader of the country. You need me to be there — Joe Biden who negotiates,’” she said. “Because that is how he sold himself originally and, in my view, the more he says he has a set position and he is not going off of it, it really goes against what the folks that voted for Joe Biden thought they were getting.”

One item in the House plan that both Manchin and Capito adamantly support is federal permitting reform, which is needed to speed up the process for infrastructure projects, including all energy initiatives.