McCarthy: Republicans aren’t moving goalposts in debt negotiations

Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said on Sunday that Republicans aren’t moving the goalposts when it comes to negotiations with the White House over the debt ceiling.

“We have never offered something different than we talked about the entire time,” McCarthy said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures,” shortly before a phone call with President Biden on the matter.

Debt ceiling talks broke down on Saturday, after McCarthy suggested that the White House was “moving backwards” adding that negotiations could not continue until President Biden returned from a Group of Seven (G-7) in Japan.

“The president pivoted back. He actually proposed spending billions more next year than we spend this year,” McCarthy said on Sunday, adding to a notion he’s expressed before, “It seems as though he wants default more than he wants a deal. That’s not where I’m at.”

Biden during a press conference in Japan earlier Sunday called on Republicans to “move from their extreme positions,” claiming that “much of what they’ve already proposed is simply, quite frankly, unacceptable.”

Both sides had previously expressed optimism that negotiations were progressing. The talks paused briefly on Friday before they resumed again.

“All the discussions we had before, I felt we were at a place that we could agree together, that we would have compromise. We wouldn’t get what our bill said. We would find compromise, that we could lift the debt limit,” McCarthy told “Sunday Morning Futures,” adding, “Now the president, even though he was overseas, fought to change places. I don’t understand that.”

However, McCarthy said later on Sunday that this his call with the president was “productive” and that the two would meet in-person on Monday, but also declared that his position had not changed.