“Look, there shouldn't be negotiations on the debt limit,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Monday. “This is something that they should get to regular order and get to work on. We should not have House Republicans manufacturing a crisis on something that has been done 78 times since 1960.”Jean-Pierre pitched the meeting as more of a Biden lecture. “So we're telling them — or saying to them: Do your job,” she said.
“Let me be very clear: Congress needs to do its job,” budget director Shalanda Young concurred. “Tomorrow, they could put a bill on the floor to make sure we don't default. This is of people's own making.” At the same time, Young was saying Biden and his team did not view the only debt ceiling extension to pass a house of Congress, however narrowly, to be the starting point for the talks even though there is a risk of default sometime in June.
This could all be posturing. In his 36 years in the Senate, Biden threw sharp partisan elbows in public and negotiated in private. He led the debt ceiling talks with House Republicans as vice president under former President Barack Obama, which did result in some spending cuts.