Politico

Congressional leaders engaged in a lot of happy talk after Tuesday’s debt meeting with President Joe Biden. Not everyone is convinced they’re any closer to a deal.

Leaders agreed to narrow a bicameral negotiation down to Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Biden, hoping fewer players might be more productive in reaching a bipartisan deal to raise the debt ceiling. Even then, it looks like a longshot to some Senate Democrats.

“It’s not about being comfortable with Biden or anyone else. It’s about the House. Kevin’s in shackles. He’s in leg, arms and hand cuffs. And frankly I don’t think he’s got much capacity to negotiate. And very little capacity to advance a deal,” said Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), a former eight-term House member.

“I’m quite pessimistic about McCarthy. He’s very constrained,” Welch added, before referring to a last-ditch strategy to prevent a default that Biden floated earlier this month. “I think we’re heading toward a decision on the 14th Amendment.”

The Big Four congressional leaders left a meeting with the president on Tuesday feeling better about the trajectory of negotiations. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer signed off on a McCarthy-Biden negotiation and talked of a collective mission to avoid default. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said it was “encouraging” that the speaker and Biden planned to have more focused talks and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries called the confab a “a very positive cordial, open and honest discussion.”

Even McCarthy struck a positive tone, though he remained pessimistic about tangible progress.

“Nothing has been resolved in this negotiation,” McCarthy said. “The only thing that has changed is, we finally have a format that has proven to work years in the past. Now, all the years in the past, they had more time to negotiate.”

Yet there’s an underlying worry, particularly in the Democratic Senate, that not much has changed at all.

While Republicans continue to demand significant funding cuts in exchange for helping to lift the debt limit, many Democrats still say they aren’t actually negotiating on the debt ceiling at all. Instead, they say they’re merely holding a concurrent negotiation on the budget that could enact spending caps, take back unused Covid money, ease energy permitting and potentially change work requirements for aid programs.

That negotiation could carry on well past the approaching June deadline to raise the debt ceiling, Democrats say, given the big demands that House Republicans are starting with. In the meantime, conservatives remain confident that McCarthy won’t undercut their spending priorities by moving to the left.

“I don’t have a lot of reason not to trust the decisions our leader makes. And I trust President Biden. I’m just very skeptical that there’s going to be an agreement in time,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.). “We’re gonna get to a point where we are McCarthy has to decide whether he’s willing to proceed to default.”

The GOP, of course, disagrees. And McCarthy is happy to have more latitude in talks with the president and top White House aides Steve Ricchetti, Shalanda Young and Louisa Terrell.

The California Republican had vented to his colleagues just hours before the meeting that the current format of negotiations — with all four party leaders in a room with the president — wasn’t fruitful. Speaking to his conference on Tuesday morning, McCarthy said the five of them had achieved little in their first sitdown last week, arguing that Schumer had prevented Biden from fully engaging with the speaker and McConnell, according to two people familiar with his remarks. Whenever Biden did seem to agree with Republicans, McCarthy said Schumer would try to cut him off.

Yet it’s not clear that a new set of negotiators can dramatically speed up talks and avoid a collision with the Biden administration’s own June 1 deadline. McCarthy told reporters after the meeting that he had warned the president about the time crunch: “You’re going to bumble your way into a default.”

With roughly 15 days to go, McCarthy’s conference has remained in lockstep behind him. No Republicans have publicly spoken out against his approach so far — even as House Democrats privately work to pick off potential defectors, hoping to convince more centrist Republicans to help stave off a looming default with less-conventional options.

“I’ve got confidence that Kevin McCarthy can’t really negotiate a bad deal, and get it passed in the House and retain his speakership,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) said.

As Hill Democrats’ desperation grows, Jeffries and his leadership team expect to move ahead as soon as Wednesday morning with their own last-ditch plan. That move, known as a discharge petition, would force McCarthy to take action on a separate debt plan — but only if they get enough lawmakers’ signatures, including at least five Republicans.

In reality, though, Democrats have little hope of landing the signatures they’d need to gain that procedural power, according to interviews with a half-dozen moderate Republicans.

“Not for anything,” said swing-district Rep. Mike Garcia (R-Calif.) when asked if he’d sign onto Democrats’ plans. “If they’re willing to go through all the work of putting the discharge petition together, [they] should come to the table and negotiate a package that has reasonable concessions for spending behavior pattern changes that will allow us to hopefully prevent this in the future.”

Even with the time crunch, open pessimism and the dire consequences of default, some in the Capitol are still zen. They’ve seen the freak out before — and say it’s just a matter of time before something gives.

Asked if he’s worried about a potential debt ceiling breach, Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) replied: “Not really. This is, to me, the same old song and dance … they’ll get something worked out.”

Adam Cancryn and Nicholas Wu contributed to this report.

The White House said President Joe Biden will head to Japan this week to attend the G-7 summit but “we’re reevaluating the rest of the trip” amid ongoing debt ceiling negotiations with congressional Republicans.

The president is scheduled to leave Wednesday for Hiroshima. He had planned to make visits afterward to Papua New Guinea before heading to the Quad Summit in Australia, but National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said that part of the trip is up in the air.

The stops in Australia and Papua New Guinea were meant to affirm the U.S. commitment to the Pacific as China’s influence in the region rises.

If Joe Biden and House Republicans fail to reach a debt deal, the crisis could get tossed to the Supreme Court — where it would scramble the usual priorities of the court’s conservatives.

The court’s current approach to most cases is overwhelmingly pro-market and business-friendly. The justices would be wary of stoking economic calamity.

At the same time, the conservative majority has been highly skeptical of Biden’s attempts to harness executive power and bypass Congress. If he invoked the 14th Amendment to avoid a default — an option the White House is weighing — it would be just the sort of unprecedented power grab that the conservative justices have condemned in other areas of Biden’s economic platform.

Ultimately, legal experts say, the Supreme Court might try to dodge the issue altogether. The recurring fight over the debt ceiling has always been a political standoff, and the justices might want it to stay that way.

“If you’re John Roberts — I think even if you’re Brett Kavanaugh or Amy Coney Barrett — you don’t want people to say, ‘Oh yeah, that was the case in which the Supreme Court tanked the global economy,’” Cornell law professor Michael Dorf said. “You want to be able to say, ‘Oh, they left that issue to the political branches, which tanked the global economy.’”

The odds that the justices will be asked to weigh in increased last week with the news that Biden’s advisers are considering the 14th Amendment strategy. Linked to an obscure provision known as the public debt clause, the untested theory could arguably allow him to bust through the debt ceiling without congressional sign-off.

The move would trigger a constitutional quandary layered on top of a potential financial crisis – and if challenged in court, it could rocket up to 1 First Street, perhaps even on the so-called shadow docket, the process the court uses to resolve emergency appeals quickly.

What would happen then is difficult to predict. But even Biden and his aides recognize the legal risk.

“The problem is, it would have to be litigated,” the president said on Tuesday after acknowledging that he is reviewing the option.

His treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, echoed that sentiment at a press conference on Thursday. “It’s legally questionable whether or not that’s a viable strategy,” she said.

Even as staff-level meetings continue and some participants see glimmers of hope for a deal to raise the debt ceiling, some Biden allies, including noted constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, are urging the White House to keep the 14th Amendment option on the table. The amendment’s public debt clause says “the validity of the public debt of the United States … shall not be questioned.” Some scholars argue that this provision makes the debt-ceiling statute unconstitutional – meaning that, if Congress failed to raise the ceiling, the Treasury Department would have the authority to ignore the ceiling and continue issuing new debt to pay the nation’s bills.

But the vague language of the clause has been interpreted by the Supreme Court only once – in a 1935 case called Perry v. United States that does not answer whether a congressionally mandated debt ceiling is valid.

One pending lawsuit is already seeking to clarify the question. On May 8, a union representing federal workers sought a court order barring Yellen from complying with the debt ceiling on the basis that it violates the 14th Amendment. The anticipatory lawsuit from the National Association of Government Employees argues that defaulting on the national debt would force the president to violate the Constitution by picking and choosing which congressionally authorized payments to make. In other words, according to Dorf, a default would functionally make the president conduct line-item vetoes — a practice the Supreme Court barred in Clinton v. City of New York in 1998.

“In these circumstances, the president’s least bad option is to violate the debt ceiling by continuing to borrow money, because at least that way he’s not completely making up legislative policy,” Dorf told POLITICO.

If Biden chose that route, his action almost certainly would be challenged in court, perhaps by House Republicans seeking to stop him.

Because the issue is so novel, it is difficult to predict how individual justices would interpret the public debt clause.

“They’re entering a political thicket here,” Stanley Brand, former general counsel for the House of Representatives, said of the prospect of the high court weighing in.

Brand guessed that the three liberal justices would side with Biden, while headstrong conservatives like Samuel Alito would be against.

The court’s more pragmatically minded conservatives, like John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh, may be — as they so often are on the current court — the pivotal votes.

“This one,” Dorf said, “could fall in that narrow slice where the court says, ‘Look, this is a political dispute between the president and the Congress, and they have ample means of resolving this; we don’t referee those disputes.’”

Regardless, Dorf added, Supreme Court justices will want to stay far away from economic armageddon.

“I believe there will be an ideological divide, because there is on everything with high political stakes,” he said. “But given that, I think there will be some advantage to whichever side can better characterize what it wants is for the courts to stay out and leave this to political actors.”

One problem, though, is that it would likely be weeks or months before the Supreme Court could settle the issue — and that period of limbo could itself create economic turmoil. The fastest possible resolution would take 6 to 8 weeks, Brand told POLITICO.

“Otherwise, you’re going to have the threat of a slap-dash decision, which at least speaking with respect to the Supreme Court is not what they’re going to want to do,” Brand added.

Michael McConnell, a professor at Stanford Law School, said the pace of litigation — compared with the rapid response of the markets — is one reason the case would never reach the high court.

“If the president, on his own authority, ordered the issuance of new bonds, they would not be backed by the United States and investors would be foolish to buy them,” he said.

“The economic consequence would happen immediately, long before it ever got to court,” McConnell added. “This is just an illegal, foolish idea.”

McConnell also pushed back hard against the arguments about the 14th Amendment and the debt ceiling.

“I don’t think it’s very complicated,” he said. “The president does not have authority to borrow money without authorization from Congress. Congress has authorized borrowing up to a certain point. He has no power to borrow beyond that point. The 14th Amendment has nothing to do with it.”

Tribe and other legal scholars disagree. And they say that, regardless of the legal uncertainty, the risk of litigation is overblown for a simple, practical reason: No one would have standing to sue because no one would suffer concrete harm from the president’s action.

Dorf said beneficiaries of pension funds could potentially make a strong case for standing, given contractual obligations that investors only invest in AAA-rated securities. Dorf added that the administration could circumvent that risk by selling bonds to the Federal Reserve Bank.

“If you sell bonds of dubious legality, it’s not clear who has standing,” Dorf said. “If you sell them to the Fed, I’m not sure anybody has standing to challenge that.”

That argument — that the courts might decide it’s not their place to referee this particular dispute — was echoed by Saikrishna Prakash, a professor at the University of Virginia School of Law.

“I don’t know if there can be a successful challenge because I don’t know who has standing to challenge him on raising the debt ceiling unilaterally,” Prakash told POLITICO. “In our system, something can be illegal but it doesn’t follow that you can go to court to get a remedy for it.”

The Republican-controlled House could also potentially sue. “But the courts don’t generally say that a chamber of Congress can just walk into court whenever they believe the president has usurped their constitutional powers,” Prakash said.

Of course, even a threshold dispute over standing would have to be resolved by the courts — and potentially the Supreme Court.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said Sunday crossings at the southern border have decreased since the beginning of last week despite the end of Title 42, the pandemic-era policy used to block migrants from remaining in the U.S.

U.S. Border patrol has experienced “a 50 percent drop in the number of encounters versus what we were experiencing earlier in the week, before Title 42 ended at midnight on Thursday,” Mayorkas said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

The Trump-era policy, which was used to turn away asylum seekers more than 2 million times over more than three years, expired Thursday with the end of the Covid-19 public health emergency.

Border officials braced for an influx of asylum seekers in the days following the policy’s termination, and President Joe Biden sent 1,500 National Guard troops to the Southern border to assist with the transition. But as of Sunday, the overwhelming flood of migrants had not arrived.

“It is still early,” Mayorkas acknowledged. “But you know, we’ve been planning for this transition for months and months. And we’ve been executing on our plan.”

Mayoraks attributed the unexpected numbers to the Biden administration’s messaging to asylum seekers.

“There is a lawful, safe, and orderly way to arrive in the United States that is through the pathways that President Biden has expanded in an unprecedented way,” Mayorkas said. “And then there’s a consequence if one does not use those lawful pathways.”

But some lawmakers, like Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Texas), believe it’s only a matter of time before the United States sees a surge.

“Has the message gotten though that the border is not open?” Jonathan Karl asked on ABC’s “This Week.”

“I don’t think so,” McCaul replied. “I do think there are caravans going up. I think they still want to get in.”

Now that Title 42 has expired, the White House is relying on a new rule that bars people from applying for asylum if they first cross the border illegally, or if they do not first apply in another country. Those who do cross illegally could face a five-year ban from the country.

Regardless, Republicans continued to criticize the White House’s border policies.

“What the secretary failed to say is that this week has seen more crossings than any week in our history,” Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), the House Homeland Security chair, said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“Yes, there was some anticipation, and so people started coming across at higher numbers — in fact, record-breaking numbers at the first part of the week, but in the latter part of the week, a judge ruled that they can’t do their plan of just releasing without a court date,” Green said, in reference to a Florida judge’s ruling late Thursday blocking the administration from carrying out its proposed move to “parole” migrants crossing the border.

Accusing Democrats of acting in bad faith, Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) also repeatedly blasted Biden and the Biden administration for a lack of leadership on the border situation.

“What Republicans want to see is a secure and orderly process at our Southern border,” he said on “Fox News Sunday.”

But Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) rejected Donalds’ assertion that Democrats are solely to blame. He said that a bipartisan solution is needed, and that increased funding for border patrols and immigration judges is essential.

“It’s a both-party issue,” Khanna said, citing an example of bipartisan reform: “Nothing has gotten done since President Reagan signed bipartisan immigration reform in 1986.”

Title 42, a public health policy that dated to 1944 and was imposed during Covid by the Trump administration, was unpopular among immigration activists and progressive Democrats. But its expiration sparked concern from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle over whether the Biden administration was prepared to deal with the expected increase in migration.

The Biden White House is ramping up its pressure on Senate Democrats to confirm Labor nominee Julie Su and deploying some big guns to get her nomination over the line.

Over the past two weeks, White House chief of staff Jeff Zients has placed calls to key senators who are considering her nomination, according to a White House official who asked not to be named to speak freely about the outreach. In recent days, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo and Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm have also joined the effort, calling moderate Democrats who have been noncommittal about supporting Su, according to three people familiar with the calls.

The effort comes as Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) returned to Washington last week, providing a potentially pivotal vote in support of the nomination.

In addition to his calls to senators, Zients has also coordinated with the labor unions who have strongly backed the nomination.

Su’s nomination to replace Marty Walsh as Labor secretary has hung in limbo for weeks, with several moderate Democrats keeping quiet about whether they would back her. With Republican opposition to the confirmation universal, the Biden administration has virtually no margin for error. The ability to confirm Su — the White House’s first attempt to replace a departed Cabinet official — will provide an early test of how much political juice Biden has as he gears up for reelection. It also is one of the first major congressional hurdles Zients faces in his new role.

The administration officials argue Su is highly qualified and from the same mold as Walsh. They’ve also pointed out her background as the daughter of Chinese immigrants.

Walsh, who stepped down from the post in February, has been working closely with Su, talking with moderate Democrats on the fence and helping shepherd outside support. He’s been telling lawmakers that he and Su were true partners at the Labor Department.

“We have a great policy agenda, and we have a great agenda moving forward, and she’s going to continue the work that we’ve done for the last two years,” he said.

Walsh expressed frustration that Su has not yet been confirmed.

“It’s disappointing because Julie is a good person, and she’ll make a great secretary. I took the job as the mayor of Boston. Julie is far better prepared for this job than I was,” he said, citing her experience in California’s labor agency and in the federal government.

Su was confirmed as Walsh’s deputy secretary in 2021 with support of the full Senate Democratic caucus, which was then at 50 lawmakers. Su’s allies hoped the recent nature of that vote and the addition of one more Democratic senator would help ease the process for her confirmation to the secretary role. But it has not.

Moderate Democratic Sens. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, Mark Kelly of Arizona and Jon Tester of Montana have been publicly noncommittal about the nomination, as have Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Angus King (I-Maine).

Other Capitol Hill Democrats are hopeful Kelly, Tester and King can be won over. If so, and Su has the support of every other Democrat, the focus will turn to Manchin and Sinema. Su can only afford to lose one of them.

Tester, Sinema and Manchin have each met with her.

Manchin’s vote may prove most elusive. The senator has grown more caustic to the Biden administration in recent months as he gears up for a possible reelection bid of his own or, potentially, a presidential run under a third-party banner. Last week, Manchin promised to oppose every EPA nominee over what he called the Biden administration’s government overreach to advance its “radical climate agenda.”

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) has not yet scheduled a vote on Su.

“I’m talking to our caucus,” Schumer said late last month in his most recent public remarks about the nomination. “Julie Su is a great nominee and I’m very hopeful that she will pass.”

Republicans argue Su is a partisan who would be deferential to labor unions. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-La.), the top Republican on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, has chided Su for her role as secretary for the California Labor and Workforce Development Agency. There, she oversaw implementation of the state law that granted employment status to gig workers and oversaw a troubled unemployment insurance program.

“I’m a little skeptical of the timing of this as we head towards reelection next year,” Walsh said. “That’s not a reason not to have a strong Labor secretary.”

Since the nomination was announced in late February, labor unions have loudly backed Su. Last week, a group of 250 business leaders signed a letter in support of her nomination, building on early support from groups such as Small Business Majority and the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.

President Joe Biden is getting pummeled on immigration — from both sides of the political spectrum.

Lawsuits rolled in late Thursday night from the left and the right, amid a torrent of criticism already pouring in over his lifting of the public health order known as Title 42.

“You’re gonna have tens of thousands of people pouring into our country,” Donald Trump said at his CNN town hall this week. “We don’t want them being in our country. We have enough problems right now.”

Trump’s rebuke may have been predictable, but Biden is taking incoming from progressives, too: They say the president’s new rule — similar to a Trump-era policy referred to as the “transit ban” — is too harsh, and will further limit access to the country’s asylum system.

“It’s evident that there’s been an unmistakable shift in the president’s immigration policy,” said Rep. Chuy Garcia (D-Ill.), pointing to Biden administration officials floating family detention, sending troops to the border, and making it harder for some migrants to apply for asylum. “I know that the administration is in a tough spot, but it’s beyond disappointing to see them trying to appease Republicans on immigration.”

How Biden’s administration handles the upheaval could determine whether immigration will be a typical, second-tier campaign issue that fires up the MAGA base but moves few votes — or a topic that rattles voters across the political spectrum and casts doubt on Biden’s competency, like the pullout from Afghanistan.

The White House says the critics have it wrong. The end of the Covid-19 public health emergency necessitated the end of Title 42, a policy that did little to deter border crossings. Beyond that, administration officials stress there are plans to try and deal with the influx of migrants, including a patchwork of efforts likely to lead to faster deportations for some.

Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on Thursday called immigration a problem that has “vexed this country for decades” and blamed congressional gridlock for failing to update outdated immigration laws. He also denied the Biden administration’s immigration policies mirrored those from the Trump era.

“We stand markedly different than the prior administration. We do not resemble it at all,” he told White House reporters at Thursday’s briefing, citing the reunifications of migrant families that were separated at the order, the withdrawal of the so-called public charge rule and other policies.

After midnight on Friday, groups of migrants crossed the border, camping out in border towns and filling immigration processing centers. At some ports of entry, it was a quiet, orderly night, according to reports, but thousands more migrants are expected to make the trek this month — historically the busiest month for migration in the hemisphere.

Republicans have posted images and videos of border cities packed with migrants. Some GOP presidential candidates have made plans to visit the border to spotlight the troubles; Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is prepping to send more migrant flightsfrom Texas to Democratic-led areas around the country. House Republicans on Thursday passed a sweeping immigration bill, a symbolic victory the party will likely point to in their attacks against the president.

Still, Democrats and Biden allies who spoke to POLITICO, including Garcia, pushed back on the notion that immigration will be a top issue with 2024 voters, noting that inflation and abortion led voters in 2022. In past election years, immigration also fell below the economy and health care even as Republicans, including Trump, sought to elevate fears around it.

Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-Texas), a co-chair of Biden’s reelection campaign, said Republicans refuse to “acknowledge their own role” in what’s unfolding at the border.

“In fact, many of the people complaining the loudest about what’s happening at the border have been in Congress the longest and have done nothing on this issue,” Escobar said in an interview.

An administration official familiar with the White House’s messaging strategy said officials plan to go on offense in the coming months on immigration.

“We’re not going to shy away from the fight,” said the official, who was granted anonymity to speak freely. “We’re going to make it quite clear who is responsible for what.”

A Biden campaign official said the president will continue to speak candidly about the border challenge just as he did on Tuesday night when he noted things would be “chaotic for a while,” but he also will forge ahead with policy solutions. The official said Biden’s leadership on the issue is in “stark contrast with GOP presidential contenders who are more focused on political stunts than solutions.”

The Biden administration this week repeatedly highlighted its cross-agency, multipronged approach to managing the border: Once Title 42 was lifted late Thursday, the Biden administration returned to expedited removal processes under Title 8 — the decades-old existing immigration law. It would ban these migrants from the country for five years. The administration is also relying on a rule that bars some migrants from applying for asylum if they fail to first apply for safe harbor while crossing through another country on the way to the U.S. The president also sent 1,500 active-duty troops to help manage the border.

The administration also is working to establish regional centers in Guatemala and Colombia to process migrants for asylum and other legal pathways before they reach the southern U.S. border, though the timeline remains unclear. The White House also is continuing its humanitarian parole program for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans, while expanding the family reunification parole program to include Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and Colombia.

“Now, given all that House Republicans have had to say about our plan, you would think they’d have some grand alternative. But think again,” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said earlier this week.

Even as the White House puts up a public fight, behind closed doors, top aides are bracing for the arrival of thousands of migrants in the weeks ahead — with great concern about how the public will perceive Biden’s management of the growing humanitarian crisis.

This could matter most for moderate voters who chose Biden in 2020 because they were “tired of chaos,” said Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist. Core Republican voters will blame Biden, Heye said, while core Democrats will argue that congressional Republicans should have moved forward on the president’s Day One plan for comprehensive immigration reform. But for moderate voters, the visuals they see in the coming days and weeks could have an impact.

“You don’t have these kinds of stark videos on health care, certainly don’t have them on tax policy. And so if we see this surge of people coming to and crossing the border, that’s going to be a problem for the administration,” Heye said. “We know how Republicans are going to message it. You could have some moderate or certainly border Democrats speak along those lines as well.”

Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Texas) drove his truck last week through El Paso, where he saw hundreds of migrants camped out around a local church. He said some were sick with tuberculosis and other illnesses caught while completing the harrowing journey to the U.S.

“Basically they’ve left this horrible place, and they’re not yet through this horrible journey,” said Gonzales, noting that it’s different for him having spent time in these border cities. “You look in somebody’s eyes — you can’t unsee that. You can’t unsmell that … That’s the part of it that doesn’t really make it. For the local people that live there, life has changed.”

Gonzales said he hosted GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley at the border earlier this year, and he expects another 2024 contender to make the trip in the near future.

The Texas Republican, who also met with border agents and local police officers and volunteers, talked last week to local leaders who pleaded for help managing the border. He said he also got a call from Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei, who told him he couldn’t reach the White House to talk about the 80,000 migrants in his country making their way to the U.S.

“When I get a call from the president of Guatemala, and then I reach out to the White House and say, ‘Hey, can we have a sit down to talk about what is happening because I’m getting calls from heads of state that are saying, there’s a caravan of people headed your way,’ and I don’t get a call back?” Gonzales said. “It’s almost as if they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”

A U.S. official, when asked about Gonzales’ comments, said the White House is in regular touch with the Guatemalan government and that the Biden administration looks forward to “continue working closely with them, as well as other partners in the region.”

Biden’s 2024 message on immigration won’t be as clear-cut as it was in 2020, when he promised Democrats he would put an end to much-maligned Trump-era policies, open the country to more migrants and overhaul the existing, broken system. But the absence of clarity could alienate Latino voters, a power voting bloc Biden and his party need to woo in order to win back the White House and compete in Congressional and Senate races next year.

“Democrats have been so fearful of touching immigration because they feel that they’re going to lose independents and moderates,” says Maria Teresa Kumar, the chief executive officer of Voto Latino. “I think it’s a miscalculation on their part.”

If the U.S. government doesn’t run out of borrowing power by mid-June, the nation probably won’t risk breaching the debt limit until “at least the end of July,” Congress’ nonpartisan budget office said Friday.

That longer-range scenario could wreck Congress’ annual monthlong break in August, keeping lawmakers in Washington to settle on a plan for raising the debt limit and preventing the nation from defaulting on its $31.4 trillion in debt. But in the worst-case scenario, the Treasury Department could still run out of money to pay the bills during the first two weeks of June, the Congressional Budget Office said, piling more pressure on Republicans and the White House to strike a deal that lifts the borrowing limit in just a few short weeks.

The new analysis differs from other predictions on the best-case scenario, anticipating the government could have enough borrowing power until August.

The projection is just the latest in a string of government and independent estimates that warn of a potentially cataclysmic debt crisis in early June, prompting serious discussions between Biden administration officials and congressional staff who can’t afford to wait and see whether Treasury is able to skate by when it comes to paying the bills next month.

At the start of this month, the Treasury Department had almost $360 billion in borrowing power, the budget office said Friday. That includes $316 billion in cash, plus $41 billion from the “extraordinary measure” administration officials can use to bolster the nation’s borrowing cushion when the government gets close to hitting the so-called X-date.

CBO estimates that the government is likely to need between $200 billion and $300 billion this month to make all of its payments. Then for June, Treasury is likely to need between $75 billion and $100 billion, with most of the payments frontloaded toward the beginning of the month.

Earlier this week, the Bipartisan Policy Center predicted that the Treasury Department could make it until “at least early July and perhaps several weeks beyond” before hitting the X-date, if the government doesn’t run out of cash early next month.

A default in early June could mean missed or delayed Social Security checks, payments to Medicaid providers, veterans benefits and more, the think tank warned.

President Joe Biden and top congressional leaders were originally slated to meet on Friday until the White House postponed the confab, allowing staff to continue their discussions on a potential budget and spending deal. A second meeting between Biden, Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell is now expected to occur next week.

Lawmakers and aides say they’re making progress, eyeing possible areas of compromise in a broader budget deal, like energy permitting reforms and the rescission of unspent Covid aid.

But both sides remain very far apart on a number of critical issues, while the White House maintains that it is not negotiating over raising the debt limit, insisting that budget discussions remain on a separate track.

Republicans want 10 years of strict spending limits and $130 billion in spending cuts next year in exchange for raising the debt ceiling, for example. The administration is pushing for a much shorter budget deal and has rejected such steep cuts.

The White House is also resistant to rolling back Biden’s legislative achievements, tightening work requirements for federal benefits and dismantling the president’s student loan relief efforts — all priorities for Republicans in a deal that they see as inextricably tied to raising the borrowing limits.