'He's Basically Playing Russian Roulette' With The Economy: Republicans Blast Biden On Refusal To Negotiate With McCarthy

Amid the White House's declaration that they will be "happy to meet with [House Speaker] McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended" that set preconditions for talks, Republicans have some choice words of their own about Biden's debt negotiation tactics. Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) blasted Joe Biden in a speech about the need to put the country back on the path of economic stability and to reduce the debt burden. He praised the work done by House Republicans in their passage of the Limit, Save, and Grow Act of 2023 for being an attempt to do just that. Biden, however, says he will veto if the same legislation passes in the Senate.

In his speech, the Ohio Senator proclaimed that "What Joe Biden has done is refuse to negotiate from the very beginning. He's basically playing Russian Roulette with the country's finances and telling Republicans they need to do exactly what he wants them to do or he's going to drive the American economy off a cliff."
 

WATCH: @JDVance1 rips Joe Biden for refusing to negotiate on the debt ceiling🔥

"He's basically playing Russian Roulette with the country's finances and telling Republicans they need to do exactly what he wants them to do or he's going to drive the American economy off a cliff." pic.twitter.com/2NqXklyQx8

— William Martin (@wsmartin218) May 3, 2023

"What Kevin McCarthy and House Republicans just did is save the President of the United States from his own failure of leadership. This could have been a very productive process if Joe Biden had from the get-go shown some leadership, which is what you should expect from the President of the United States" he observed. 

Senator Vance lamented that "Instead he put all on House Republicans to come [and] to negotiate a deal" but he noted that  "that is exactly what they [Republicans] did."

He concluded by remarking that "the last thing I want to say is that I have heard a lot of criticism from Democrats about things they don't like in this package [the Limit, Save, and Grow Act of 2023], I guarantee you [that] all 217 Republicans who voted for it didn't like at least one thing in the package. But they came together because paying the country's debts and doing our job as leadership is more important than any single person. Joe Biden should take a cue from Congressional Republicans, show some leadership, come to the table- the country needs him to do exactly that."  
Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) also had some choice words for President Biden. He commented that the president ought to repeat what he did back in 2011 in negotating a deal for the debt but said that "And I'll say, sadly, the reason he hasn't so far I believe, is because his mental faculties are too diminished right now to do what he did in 2011, to sit down and actually work together on a solution to the problems."

The Texan conservative opined that "What we're left with is a bunch of young staffers in the White House, radical children, who are perfectly willing to risk a default on the debt because they have no appreciation of the chaos and misery and damage."

Founding Father and the third President of the United States Thomas Jefferson once warned in a 1816 letter to John Taylor "that banking establishments are more dangerous than standing armies; and that the principle of spending money to be paid by posterity, under the name of funding, is but swindling futurity on a large scale." In the same letter he also wrote that "I consider as limited, rightfully, to a redemption of the debt within the lives of a majority of the generation contracting it." What Jefferson was saying was that it is not in the interest of liberty or morality for one generation to indebt another. 

Yet, this is what the United States has proceeded on a vast scale to do with its debt of $31.4 trillion.