Democratic leader accuses McCarthy of reneging on budget deal with Biden

The head of the House Democratic Caucus went after Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) on Tuesday, accusing the GOP leader of reneging on a budget deal he cut with President Biden this month as part of the debt ceiling package.

Rep. Pete Aguilar (D-Calif.) said McCarthy, by encouraging GOP appropriators to set 2024 spending levels below the caps agreed upon with Biden, has both defied the terms of the deal and increased the likelihood of a government shutdown later in the year. 

“It’s shocking that it took less than two weeks for Republicans to walk away from an agreement that they made,” Aguilar said during a press briefing in the Capitol. 

“This is an agreement that the Speaker made directly. And he took pains — remember? — to get everybody else out of the room and to get to a deal with just him and the president. And now he’s walking away from that deal,” Aguilar continued. “If it wasn’t so dangerous, it would be laughable.”

Asked if the GOP’s strategy heightens the risk of a government shutdown, Aguilar didn’t pause. 

“I think it very well could,” he said.

Under the debt ceiling agreement, McCarthy and Biden set caps on federal spending for fiscal 2024 — when outlays are essentially frozen at 2023 levels — and 2025, when a 1 percent increase would be in place.

Hard-line conservatives have bashed the legislation, saying it strays too far from the partisan debt ceiling package Republicans passed in late April, which featured much deeper cuts over a much longer window. The conservatives have accused McCarthy of caving to Biden on a top GOP priority, and now they want him to battle for steeper cuts as part of the effort to fund the government next year. 

McCarthy has responded to the pressure by emphasizing that the caps he negotiated with Biden merely represent an upper limit.

“You always have to remember with appropriation levels — that’s your cap. You can always do less,” McCarthy told reporters Monday in the Capitol.

Rep. Kay Granger (R-Texas), chairwoman of the powerful Appropriations Committee, has adopted that same argument, issuing a statement Monday night saying she’ll be marking up spending bills below the Biden-McCarthy caps. She’s aiming to cut spending back to 2022 levels. 

“The Fiscal Responsibility Act set a topline spending cap – a ceiling, not a floor – for Fiscal Year 2024 bills,” Granger said. “That is why I will use this opportunity to mark up appropriations bills that limit new spending to the Fiscal Year 2022 topline level.”

That objective is estimated to cut federal spending by roughly $130 billion below current levels, raising questions about whether GOP leaders could rally the support from moderate GOP lawmakers who tend to support many of the programs likely to be affected. At this early stage, however, some of those moderates are downplaying those concerns. 

“There’s going to be a process; it will play itself out,” Rep. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) said Tuesday.

Aguilar, who sits on the Appropriations Committee, noted that neither Biden nor the Democratic-led Senate will ever accept spending levels below those included in the debt ceiling agreement. With that in mind, he said House Republican leaders are forcing their rank-and-file members to take a politically risky vote on cuts to popular programs for one reason only: to prevent hard-line conservatives from going after McCarthy’s gavel. 

“The Senate is going to mark up to the deal that was made. And so House Republicans are going to completely make themselves irrelevant [and] make their members vote on these deep, deep cuts, and it has no possibility of becoming law,” Aguilar said. 

“[It’s] incredibly difficult to see that they want to put their members through this,” he added. “But these are the deals that Kevin McCarthy has to make in order to hold the gavel.”