Fox News’ Jacqui Heinrich fact-checked White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre in real time during Tuesday’s White House press briefing when Jean-Pierre repeated several false claims about the debt limit.
Jean-Pierre was briefing reporters ahead of a scheduled meeting between President Joe Biden and House and Senate Republicans on the debt limit. She stuck to her uncompromising tone of the past several weeks.
Heinrich began by asking Jean-Pierre why the White House claimed that it would not negotiate over the debt limit together with spending caps, when “half the country” wanted the two parties to have that conversation.
The press secretary did not answer directly, but repeated earlier claims that the bill passed by House Republicans two weeks ago included cuts to important programs and threatened a default on the debt.
Heinrich then countered by observing that the Republican bill did, in fact, raise the debt limit, and therefore avoided default. Jean-Pierre admitted that was so, but claimed that the House bill required cuts to programs helping seniors and schools.
Heinrich replied that there was nothing in the House Republican bill that specified any such cuts — that it did not have any appropriations in it — and the Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) had in fact ruled out the cuts that Jean-Pierre was claiming, erroneously, that Republicans had made.
She asked whether moderate Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) was also a “MAGA Republican extremist” — the term used by the White House to describe the opposition — for suggesting that a compromise was needed.
Jean-Pierre simply repeated her claim that Republicans’ debt limit bill, which raises the borrowing limit in exchange for modest spending cuts, was “extreme” and that Americans did not want their legislation.
She implied that the 2022 election — in which Republicans actually took over control of the House — gave Democrats a mandate to oppose spending cuts and to raise the debt ceiling without any conditions.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.