The White House threw cold water on the prospect of a sit-down between President Biden and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), arguing Wednesday that there’s nothing to negotiate and the Speaker should bring a bipartisan national security funding bill up for a vote.
“What is there to negotiate? Really, truly, what is the one-on-one negotiation about, when he’s been presented with exactly what he asked for?” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in a briefing with reporters.
“He’s negotiating with himself. He’s killing bills on his own,” she continued. “And if he were to put that bill that just came out of the Senate — the national security supplemental that doesn’t have border security in it because he said he didn’t want it, he changed his mind — it would pass. It would pass in a bipartisan way.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The White House threw cold water on the prospect of a sit-down between President Biden and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.
), arguing Wednesday that there’s nothing to negotiate and the Speaker should bring a bipartisan national security funding bill up for a vote.
Jean-Pierre noted Biden met with Johnson and other congressional leaders at the White House in January to discuss aid for Ukraine in its war against Russia, as well as other national security funding the administration had pushed for.
But Johnson declared that bill dead on arrival in the House, instead urging Biden to take executive action.
Deputy press secretary Andrew Bates suggested in a statement Thursday that Johnson might be “feeling heat and grasping for an escape hatch” in the wake of a Democratic victory in a special House election in New York and after some members said the national security supplemental would pass if it were put up for a vote.
“While politics may make the Speaker feel compelled to side with dictators, this is still a democracy and he owes the country a clean vote.”
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