WASHINGTON (AP) — On a morning in the middle of the debt ceiling crisis, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hopped on his mountain bike and took a ride down the National Mall, marveling at the monuments.
The next day he arrived for negotiations at the Capitol with carts of tortillas and queso for the beleaguered reporters who waited outside his office during the 24-hour talks.
McCarthy, with his laid-back California vibe, was never Washington’s bet to become speaker, having barely picked up the gavel in a historic performance earlier this year.
But the 58-year-old now leads House Republicans in the act of his career: Having negotiated with Democratic President Joe Biden on raising the nation’s debt limit, he must now deliver the votes to pass the spending cuts package into law. .
The standoff is being watched around the world as the United States braces for a June 5 deadline when it could run out of cash to pay its bills, which could throw off the northern economy – American into chaos with an unprecedented default and bring the global economy to a crisis.
McCarthy has only a small majority in the House and must reach out to Democrats to support the compromise. But neither side is expected to be satisfied with the deal announced Saturday afternoon.
If McCarthy succeeds in pushing the budget-cutting deal through Congress, it will be an achievement unlike anything he has accomplished before. Or he could lose it all, if the compromise he reached with the Democratic White House becomes so objectionable to the conservative wing that Republicans try to oust him from his job.
“One thing you’ve always learned about me: I don’t quit,” McCarthy told reporters when he arrived at the Capitol Saturday morning.
“No matter how many times it takes,” he continued, “you want to make sure you get a deal that’s worthy of the American public.”
Throughout the weeks of grueling negotiations, McCarthy has remained relentlessly optimistic, pushing through the anxiety-filled hours, seemingly certain of the outcome.
Underestimated from the start, he is nothing short of relentless. To become speaker, McCarthy endured 14 failed votes before finally securing the gavel at the 15th attempt, only after exhausting his colleagues and giving hard-right conservatives all sorts of promises and concessions.
McCarthy is not known as a seasoned lawmaker, one who has delved into policy details or put his name to many big bills.
Having arrived in Congress in 2007, he quickly rose to leadership as a political strategist, not a political jerk.
Younger than the previous generation of congressional leaders, McCarthy is decades younger than Biden. The president has been in elected office since McCarthy was a young man growing up in dusty Bakersfield, running a sandwich counter at his uncle’s yogurt shop and immersing himself in Reagan-era politics.
The White House initially refused to engage with McCarthy on the debt ceiling, insisting that Congress simply needed to do its job, raise the nation’s debt limit and skip the political line.
Driven by a right wing, McCarthy was determined to extract federal spending cuts from programs trusted by many Americans in exchange for the votes in Congress needed to raise the nation’s debt limit.
McCarthy set a marker in his first meeting with Biden in February. The new Republican speaker refused to raise any taxes to help offset federal deficits, including Biden’s proposals to roll back some of the Trump-era tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans and corporations.
The White House eventually caved to negotiations with McCarthy after McCarthy pushed the GOP’s preferred debt ceiling plan through the House, uniting its majority for future talks.
Democrats argue that the showdown over the debt limit should not be the nation’s new normal way of doing business.
Despite pleas from progressives, Biden has been reluctant to invoke 14th Amendment powers to increase borrowing capacity on his own, unconvinced of their legal soundness.
The debt ceiling fight is not one that Congress has to take on, and historically it rarely has. An often routine effort, voting to raise the debt limit, now at $31 trillion, would allow the Treasury Department to keep paying the bills without any risk of default, ensuring America’s position as the world’s economy with the most reliable currency.
Once Republicans took power in the House during last year’s midterm elections, it was almost certain that a debt ceiling showdown would land on Biden’s doorstep. That was the last time Republicans swept to power, in 2011, on the tea wave that ushered in the new era of brinksmanship in Washington, using the debt ceiling as leverage.
But those clashes have also tested GOP leaders, bundling past Republican speakers unable to fully satisfy the party’s increasingly conservative wing.
The far-right House Freedom Caucus hounded a former speaker, John Boehner, into early retirement. Another speaker, Paul Ryan, stepped down after a short term.
To become speaker, McCarthy worked hard to appeal to these same forces, agreeing to revive a House rule that allowed any member to request a vote to expel the speaker. Forcing him out of office would require a majority vote.
That threat hangs over McCarthy at every turn as he tries to broker a deal on the debt ceiling.
Conservative Rep. Dan Bishop, RNC, warned in a tweet Saturday, before the deal was announced, that if the speaker brought back a “clean” debt ceiling increase, meaning one that doesn’t prioritize of the party, “it’s war”.
But even if conservatives are frustrated with McCarthy, he still has an important voice in his corner: former President Donald Trump.
As an early backer of Trump’s first bid for the White House, McCarthy has tried to stay close to Trump despite their on-again, off-again relationship. She said they spoke in recent days and Trump told her, “Make sure you get a good deal.”
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Associated Press writers Stephen Groves, Mary Clare Jalonick, Kevin Freking and Farnoush Amiri contributed to this report.
