Media’s debt-limit coverage is dishonest.

According to Politico’s White House Bureau Chief Jonathan Lemire, “Joe Biden has prioritized deal-making throughout the debt ceiling talks. But with GOP obstinate, Biden is changing tactics.” But wait, what is he talking about? Just last month, Lemaire’s publication reported that Biden was “happy to meet” with Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy but “not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended. That’s not negotiable.” That doesn’t sound like someone who’s “prioritized deal-making” on the debt ceiling.

Biden’s position was widely known and defended. A slew of columns from Democrats like Dan Pfeiffer, an advisor to Barack Obama, laid out why Biden shouldn’t negotiate with Kevin McCarthy. Lefty reporter Ronald Brownstein attempted to rationalize the “Logic Behind Biden’s Refusal to Negotiate the Debt Ceiling”— which, not that long ago, was called “obstructionism” or “nihilism.”

Back in February, it was McCarthy who invited Biden to sit down. The president kept promising he would not negotiate, presumably to apply pressure by scaremongering voters about a potentially ruinous default. And that was Biden’s prerogative. However, the idea, as Lemire would have you believe, that the president has shown a “reluctance to play hardball” is a complete myth.

Biden is no Henry Clay. This is a president who’s shown no qualms about abusing executive power — even now, threatening an unconstitutional plan to use the 14th Amendment to pay off debt. This is a president who recently crammed through the most expensive reform bill in history, using reconciliation and without a single vote from Republicans.

So while we can’t bore into the souls of the participants and expose their true feeling about a potential default, the fact is that the only people in that entire conversation who have already passed a hike to the debt limit are House Republicans. Democrats could just sign off on it if they wanted. No default.

No one, of course, expects Democrats to unilaterally surrender. But media always covers negotiations over spending as if the organic center, the endpoint, the only reasonable place to be, stands not between the desires of two competing political parties or two competing branches of government but rather wherever Democrats happen to reside.

Unlike many reporters, Lemire at least acknowledges, however begrudgingly, that Republicans have already hiked the debt ceiling. “McCarthy,” he notes, “managed to narrowly pass his GOP spending bill in late April” — as if everything in DC, including the massive “inflation reduction act,” weren’t “narrowly” passed. The rest of the piece, like so many others, is strewn with mythology — “Biden and his team had been buoyed by their belief that a consensus building approach” are words that appear in this piece. All of it is so lazy and transparent, and insufferable.

Debt Ceiling Negotiations: The Reality

• The ceiling was passed to control government debt. That’s why it exists.
• Those who demand reforms are no more taking hostages than those who demand unfettered spending.
• The left proposes raising a bunch of taxes. The right proposes rolling back spending to levels from a year ago.
• Reasonable people can disagree about who’s right.
• The default position of the Washington press corps seems to be that anything other than an automatic hike — a “clean” bill — is some kind of attack on democracy.

Just ask Jeff Stein, the Washington Post econ reporter, who notes that progressives and Democrats are concerned about a “Biden-McCarthy deal that they fear rewards the GOP for taking the debt limit hostage.” Or even better, “‘Debt-Limit Terror’ Is No Way to Run a Superpower,” says Susan Glasser.

David Harsanyi is a senior editor at The Federalist, a nationally syndicated columnist, a Happy Warrior columnist at National Review, and author of five books. Follow him on Twitter, @davidharsanyi.

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