Democrats offer glimpse of strategy to outflank McCarthy and raise debt ceiling – live

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Fed poised to raise interest rates

The Federal Reserve is set to raise interest rates this afternoon, with an announcement coming at 2pm from the central bank after its most recent board meeting. Analysts expect the Fed will raise rates by a quarter point, which will bring rates up to 5% to 5.25%. This would be the central bank’s 10th interest rate increase since March 2022, when rates were at zero.

The interest rate increase will come at what in hindsight may seem like an inflection point for the economy. Inflation is down, consumer spending has flattened and growth in the job market is starting to slow down, but Fed officials, especially Fed chair Jerome Powell, have been stringent on getting inflation down to their target of 2%. Inflation in March was 5%, the lowest it’s been since 2021, but still quite far from 2%.

Analysts and economists will be closely watching Powell’s press conference at 2.30pm, where he will discuss the direction Fed staff see the economy going, giving hints as to whether even more interest rate hikes are to come or whether the Fed will end its rate-hike campaign.

Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell will be at the meeting between Joe Biden and House speaker Kevin McCarthy about the debt ceiling next Tuesday, but McConnell said that he isn’t going to involve himself in the specifics of negotiations.

“The president and the speaker need to reach an agreement to get us past this impasse. That’s my message going to the White House meeting,” McConnell told reporters yesterday.

Along with Biden, McConnell was a key figure in negotiating the 2011 debt ceiling crisis and has spoken about needing to avoid default in previous debates.

But McConnell is walking a fine line between his chamber, which has a slim Democratic majority, and McCarthy’s, which has a slim Republican majority. McCarthy’s bill narrowly passed the House with a 217-215 party line vote. Until it passed, it wasn’t clear whether McCarthy would be able to rally House Republicans under a bill.

Roger Marshall, a Republican senator from Kansas, told NBC News that McConnell’s job is to “keep Republicans together”.

“One of the biggest concerns I hear from people back home is: Why can’t Republicans stick together?”

US rep launches campaign to unseat Ted Cruz

US Democratic representative and former NFL player Colin Allred announced a run for Ted Cruz’s Senate seat this morning, teeing up what will likely be a closely watched race in 2024. Allred ousted former Republican representative Pete Sessions during the 2018 midterms. Session had been in Congress since 1997 and was in key House committees.

In a campaign ad released this morning, Allred can be seen standing in a football field.

“When I left the NFL, I thought my days of putting people on the ground were over. Then January 6th happened,” he said. He recalled the smashing of the glass and the shouts. He texted his wife “I love you” and then “took off my jacket and got ready to take on anyone who came through that door”.

“And Ted Cruz? He cheered on the mob. He hid in a supply closet when they stormed the Capitol. That’s Ted Cruz for you – all hat, no cattle.”

Cruz is a holdout from the Tea Party wave, coming into the Senate in 2012 and making himself known as a staunch conservative.

Allred will be the Democrats’ second big attempt to unseat Cruz. In 2018, former US representative Beto O’Rourke lost to Cruz by 2.6%.

“The political extremism that we are becoming increasingly known for is a real risk to our business community and our path forward,” Allred told the Dallas Morning News. “It’s making some folks say they don’t want to send their kids to school in our state. We can go in a different direction.”

A Politico analysis today points out that Democrat Joe Manchin and now-Independent Kyrsten Sinema have been angling themselves to be big players in the debt ceiling debate. While all of Manchin’s Democratic colleagues have been saying the party will refuse to negotiate budget cuts over the debt ceiling – Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer called the House Republicans’ debt ceiling bill “dead on arrival” – Manchin has been pushing for bipartisan talks, which would likely end up with some kind of budget cuts.

“I think there’s a better way to approach it,” Manchin said on Monday, adding that there are “a lot of things we can agree on” over McCarthy’s bill.

Meanwhile, Sinema got slack in February for having dinner with Republican House speaker Kevin McCarthy, when it was known, by that time, that there would likely be a debt ceiling debate coming in the spring.

“She’s trying to play a constructive role and try to get people to the table to understand that we can’t go over the brink on this,” Republican Senate minority whip John Thune told Politico. To be clear, he’s saying that Sinema believes that Democrats shouldn’t go over the brink with the debt ceiling over their fights against budget cuts.

Though neither has announced a 2024 run, both are up for re-election next year, meaning that, if they wanted to, they could use the debt ceiling against their own party (and former party) as bargaining chips for their own priorities.

Democrats focus on lessons from 2011 debt ceiling crisis

Democrats are now facing their biggest test since Republicans gained control of the House in the midterms. They still have the Senate and the White House, and the Republican majority in the House is slim. Comparisons have been made to the 2011 debt ceiling crisis, which ultimately led the Democrats to agree to spending cuts, but things are a bit different this time around. Mainly, Democrats, including Joe Biden, who was at the center of negotiations at the time, felt burned after 2011 and have learned not to treat the debt ceiling as a legitimate bargaining chip.

This is why you are seeing the discharge petition, which hasn’t helped the successful passage of a bill since 2002 but could allow House Democrats to circumvent Republican leadership and force a bill onto the House floor. It is a clear sign of desperation given the difficulty of getting enough signatures, but it also signals that Democrats are trying pretty hard not to step into negotiations like they did in 2011.

Biden agreed to meet with House speaker Kevin McCarthy on 9 May, but the White House has said that Biden will emphasize budget cuts should not be negotiated over something as precarious as the debt ceiling.

“We’ll continue to be very clear about that, as we have in the last several months,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said yesterday. “He’s going to make it very clear in this meeting that they’re going to have next week how it is Congress’s constitutional duty to act. He is not going to negotiate on the debt ceiling. That is not going to change.”

A state judge in Utah on Tuesday ruled that four abortion clinics can continue to operate as a case in state courts is under review.

The ruling blocks a state law that allows abortions to be performed only by hospitals and some satellite clinics, which perform a small percentage of abortions in the state. Planned Parenthood sued the state over the law saying that it would “functionally eliminate” abortion. The state currently allows abortion up to 18 weeks of pregnancy.

Another law in the state that bans most non-emergency abortions is also waiting to be decided in state court.

Good morning, and welcome to the US politics live blog. While we’re still nearly a week away from Joe Biden’s meeting with House speaker Kevin McCarthy over the debt ceiling, the Democrats’ strategy – which so far has been to refuse budget cuts over the debt ceiling – is starting to come to light.

Democrats on Tuesday started the process of collecting signatures for a discharge petition that would force a bill that would raise the debt ceiling on to the House floor. The Democrats will need 218 signatures, which means all 213 Democrats in the chamber will need to sign on along with five Republicans – likely be a difficult task given that McCarthy got 217 for his bill tying a debt ceiling increase with budget cuts, and some Republicans voted against his bill because they wanted more cuts.

Reports yesterday also said that Biden aides have not ruled out a strategy that could put the debt ceiling against a constitutional test: ignoring it. Some legal scholars have pointed out that the 14th amendment says the “validity” of the public debt “shall not be questioned”, and the debt ceiling puts it into question. Though the White House has not publicly commented on this strategy, a New York Times report yesterday said there are internal debates over using this strategy. And the White House has not been afraid to mention the constitution when talking about Congress’s obligation to deal with the debt limit. “It is their constitutional duty – Congress’ constitutional duty to take action,” Karine Jean-Pierre said at a White House press conference yesterday.

We’ll be keeping an eye for updates on the debt ceiling today. Here’s what else we’re watching:

• The Federal Reserve is announcing updates to the interest rates today and is expected to raise rates by a quarter-point today, a move that could shake markets.

• Last night, Ayanna Pressley said she joins House Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in calling for the resignation of longtime Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein as her absence from the Senate judiciary committee has slowed down the pace of crucial judicial confirmation. Lawmakers are likely to continue to weigh in on this intensifying internal fight.