Republicans on Sunday framed an emerging debt-ceiling agreement as largely giving them what they wanted in a debt deal.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) also pushed back against suggestions the prolonged fight over raising the debt ceiling has hurt the GOP, which the White House has accused of intransigence in the talks.
“I don’t think we’ve been hurt at all,” McConnell said on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”
“The American people wanted us to do something about out-of-control spending and … the debt ceiling is going to produce what many people would believe is a complete change in the trajectory of the federal government beginning to get spending under control,” said McConnell, who is poised to be largely responsible for any package that wins muster with Congress.An eleventh-hour deal being negotiated by lawmakers and the White House would shrink the deficit by about $3 trillion in exchange for increasing the debt ceiling for 22 months. A first round of $1 trillion in deficit reduction would only include spending cuts, a Republicans demand, while the rest would be worked out in a bipartisan commission later this year.
Senate Democratic Policy Committee Chairman Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) acknowledged that conservative Republicans were able to get their way in the talks.
