WASHINGTON — Anyone wondering how a Democratic president and the newly installed Republican speaker of the House would work together got their first real preview this month, when President Biden released a budget that Republicans vowed to torpedo and Speaker Kevin McCarthy signed his first bill — one the president has promised to veto.
In a pair of dueling events, Mr. McCarthy accused Mr. Biden of being “woke” with his promise to veto a bipartisan effort to prevent retirement fund managers from assessing a company’s cultural values before investing. From Philadelphia, Mr. Biden called on Mr. McCarthy to unveil a G.O.P. budget plan: “Lay it down,” Mr. Biden said.
Mr. McCarthy responded by calling the president’s proposal “completely unserious.”
With that, the collision course between the two men, whose relationship over the next few months will among be the most important in Washington, appears to be set.
Mr. Biden, who spent 36 years in the Senate, has rosily called legislative politics “the art of the possible.” But with Mr. McCarthy publicly refusing to raise the nation’s borrowing cap without serious spending cuts and Mr. Biden refusing to negotiate on the debt ceiling at all, a feverish messaging battle has replaced functional legislating, for now, as the United States runs the risk of defaulting on its debt.
During a private Democratic Senate lunch earlier this month, Mr. Biden told the group that the speaker was in an “interesting position” — a comment that drew...
Times of Malta's editorial team has demanded that alleged money-launderer Chris Spiteri remove false claims posted on Facebook against journalist Jacob Borg. An alert has also been filed with the ...