An agreement finally in sight? While the window of opportunity is narrowing to avoid an American default, the White House and the negotiators continued Friday to build a compromise rich in political ulterior motives.
“We are closer (to an agreement), but it’s not done yet,” said a source close to the discussions, skeptical about the possibility of an announcement on Friday.
“We made progress yesterday, I want to make further progress today,” said the main Republican protagonist of this political-financial soap opera, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Kevin McCarthy.
But “nothing is certain until everything has been agreed,” he added, to keep the pressure on Democratic President Joe Biden.
There is no shortage of pressure in this affair, which is difficult to understand outside the United States and more generally outside the Washington bubble.
The challenge is to get Congress — the Republican House and the Democratic Senate — to vote quickly to raise the public debt ceiling, otherwise the United States could find itself after the 1er June in default of payment, an unprecedented situation with potentially catastrophic economic, financial and social implications.
This parliamentary maneuver has long been a formality for both parties. But this time the Republicans demand, in exchange for their green light, a reduction in public spending.
Officially, Joe Biden refuses to negotiate, believing he is being held “hostage”. In reality, the advisers of the two camps have been talking non-stop for days and according to several American media, have already agreed on a few main lines.
Find an agreement… and limit the damage
The agreement would freeze certain expenditure, but without affecting the budgets devoted to defense and veterans, reports for example the New York Times where the washington post.
It would postpone for two years, until after the next presidential election, the risk of default.
The challenge, in addition to avoiding an economic cataclysm, is to allow each camp to limit damage at the political level.
Kevin McCarthy, who needs to assert his stature as Speaker of the House, could claim to have instilled more budgetary rigor, while the Democrats would claim to have protected social benefits or major investment projects.
The American president, campaigning for re-election, explained Thursday that “two opposing visions” were at work in these discussions.
He posed as a champion of social and fiscal justice, demanding that the wealthiest and big corporations “pay their fair share” of taxes, and portraying Republicans as the party of the big money and Wall Street.
But according to the press, the 80-year-old Democrat would have given up, in negotiations with the Republicans, to increase as much as he wanted the means devoted to the fight against tax evasion.
If an agreement is found, it will still have to be adopted by the Senate, narrowly controlled by the Democrats, and by the House of Representatives, over which the Conservatives have a fragile majority.
The parliamentary calendar is constrained: many elected officials have returned to their homes across the United States for a break of several days, on the occasion of the long weekend of “Memorial Day”.
Moreover, some progressives within the Democratic Party, just like some elected representatives of the Republican Party, have threatened not to ratify, or to delay as much as possible, a text that would make too many concessions to the opposing camp.
Joe Biden and Kevin McCarthy must therefore play in the center to rally the most parliamentarians in each party, an excessively difficult exercise in a country where political divisions have widened significantly in recent years.