GOP Leader: House won’t attach Harvey relief to debt ceiling bill

House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday that the House won’t attach a debt ceiling hike to a bill to fund relief efforts for Hurricane Harvey, just days after the Trump administration called for pairing the two. 

McCarthy told Fox Business on Tuesday that the Harvey relief bill will pass the House on its own, unattached to any other legislative priorities.

The Harvey bill, scheduled for a vote Thursday, “will not be attached to anything,” McCarthy said. He assured viewers that the House would pass a clean debt ceiling increase soon after, as the supplemental Harvey relief bill would require such a move for adequate funding.

“We will deal with the debt ceiling regardless if Harvey even arrived in America, and now we are asking for more money to provide for FEMA, so FEMA does not run out of money,” McCarthy told Maria Bartiromo on “Mornings with Maria.” “What [Treasury Secretary Steven] Mnuchin is telling us, if you pass just the supplemental, they may not be able to put the money forward without having the debt ceiling raised.”

{mosads}McCarthy’s decision comes just two days after Mnuchin called for the House to not pass the supplemental bill without attaching it to the debt ceiling hike.

“The president and I believe that it should be tied to the Harvey funding,” Mnuchin said of the debt ceiling increase on “Fox News Sunday.”

“We need to help people in Texas and we need to get that done.”

On Monday, McCarthy had indicated that he was open to the proposal.

“The Treasury secretary is telling us that because of Harvey, because we are putting this extra money out there to help those in need, you’re hitting the debt ceiling faster,” McCarthy said. “That’s one of the rules of the Treasury secretary. I’m going to listen to him because the last thing I’d want to have happen here is that we pass a supplemental relief for FEMA but because of the debt ceiling, we can’t help those in need.”

Congress must vote to raise the debt ceiling by by Sept. 29 or risk a default on the debt.