'That’s How Washington Works'
Fmr Trump official devolves into hypocrisy, double-talk when asked about shifting debt-ceiling stance
A one-time top official in the Trump White House fell into the same sort of partisan hypocrisy and double-talk which once marked Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell's decision not to move on Merrick Garland's nomination to the US Supreme Court as his reply as to his shifting position on raising the federal debt-ceiling.
Mick Mulvaney, a former White House chief of staff and budget director during the Trump administration, wilted when asked on-camera directly about his shifting position on raising the federal debt ceiling.
CNN host Erin Burnett asked Mulvaney how he could stand behind Donald Trump's insistence of a clean vote in Congress to raise the debt ceiling in 2019 without any sort of partisan negotiations first, but share the view that House Republicans should now seek deep federal spending cuts before agreeing to any such increase today.
The federal government officially hit its debt limit Thursday, requiring Congress to approve an increase just so that the government can continue to pay the bills it's already accrued in past years.
It's been increased, as a matter of course, dozens of times under both Democratic and Republican presidents over the past several decades.
Should Congress fail to increase the federal debt ceiling, the federal government will eventually fall into default and cause a national and global economic meltdown.
The government has begun taking “extraordinary measures” to prevent default, although those measures will run out in June, according to Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen.
Burnett played a clip of Trump in the Oval Office in 2019 in which he said, “I can't imagine of anyone even thinking of using the debt ceiling as a negotiating wedge.”
She noted that Mulvaney and other senior Republicans fell in line behind Trump's position for a clean debt-ceiling increase then, but today he agrees that House Republicans should try to hold such a vote hostage in order to exact deep concessions from President Biden.
In reply, Mulvaney began to stammer that somehow the partisan divide in Washington DC justifies the change, much as McConnell hypocritically held up President Barack Obama's nomination of Garland in 2016 for a seat on the nation's highest court, but a few years later rushed Trump's nomination of Amy Coney Barrett for another such vacancy just weeks before the 2020 presidential election.
“That’s how Washington works, Erin. That’s how it worked for the last two years and no one seemed to complain about it. That’s just how Washington has always worked. You’ve got a situation here where you can do something like Barack Obama did back in 2011 and I think it was ’13 as well where he gave a little bit. The Democrats got a lot and we increased the debt ceiling,” Mulvaney said, referring to earlier examples of Republican lawmakers holding a debt-ceiling increase hostage under a Democratic president.
This time Biden has ruled out any such negotiations ahead of a debt-ceiling vote.
House Republicans, meanwhile, hold their majority by an historically slim margin, significantly limiting their clout — as seen during the spectacle this month in which it took an astonishing 15 rounds of balloting for Republican Kevin McCarthy to be elected speaker.
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