CLAIM: White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said during Tuesday’s press briefing that President Joe Biden tried to negotiate the federal budget “for months” with House Republicans through debt limit talks.
VERDICT: Mostly false. On May 9, Biden acknowledged it took over 97 days for him to invite House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) for a second meeting to negotiate the Republican bill to cut the budget, raise the debt ceiling, and prevent default.
“I submitted my budget on March 9th in detail,” Biden said. “He [McCarthy] passed his plan, I think, in the last or second to last week in April.”
“Five days later, after he finally put forward something, I called on him to invite him to a meeting with the other leading members of Congress,” Biden admitted.
Although Biden put forward a plan in March and met with McCarthy months later on May 9, the White House refused to negotiate the budget through debt ceiling talks until last week, claiming that budget and debt limit negotiations were separate “conversations.”
“Did the president wait too long to engage with the Republicans on the negotiations?” CBS News’s Weijia Jiang asked Jean-Pierre Tuesday.
“The president’s been trying to engage with Republicans for months now,” she responded.
Follow Wendell Husebø on Twitter @WendellHusebø. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality.
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