On Tuesday’s “CNN Newsroom,” White House Communications Director Kate Bedingfield responded to a question on President Joe Biden, in his then-role as Vice President negotiating a deal around the debt limit in 2011 and arguing that we need to find savings in the budget and how that fits with his opposition to negotiations over the debt ceiling now by stating that Biden has been “living by those values of fiscal responsibility, lowering the deficit.”
Co-host Victor Blackwell asked, “So, the President says as part of these debt ceiling talks that negotiations, cuts are off the table. But the President then, as Vice President in 2011, led the talks for the White House on this very subject, and I want to read what he said at the end of the negotiations. He clearly valued them. The statement from his office, ‘As the President and I have made clear from the beginning, the only way to make sure we begin to live within our means is by coming together behind a balanced approach that finds real savings across the budget – including domestic spending, defense spending, mandatory spending, and loopholes in the tax code. … We owe it to the American people to take every responsible step to do right by our economy and the nation’s future.’ That’s part of the debt talks in 2011, are those values and virtues not important this time around?”
Bedingfield responded, “As President, he has put forward a program that has cut the deficit and has put in place programs that are growing the economy, that are creating jobs, that are growing wages. As you just saw, he’s in New York talking about how we’re fixing tunnels and bridges and roads that are helping communities all across the country. He’s done all of that while living by those values of fiscal responsibility, lowering the deficit. And what he’s going to ask Speaker McCarthy tomorrow is, are we going to see a plan from you that does the same? Be candid with the American people about where you want to make these cuts. What he’s not willing to do is jeopardize the progress that we’ve made over the course of the last two years in bringing our economy to a more stable and growing place by playing these political games around the debt limit. So, that’s a big piece of the conversation that he’s going to have directly with the Speaker tomorrow.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett
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