Closing summary
The latest standoff over the debt ceiling kicked off today, when the US government officially hit its legal borrowing limit. The clock is now ticking for Congress to reach an agreement to raise it, otherwise the country will default for the first time in its history, perhaps as soon as June. The White House is demanding Republicans controlling the House raise the limit without conditions, but several moderate GOP lawmakers say the Biden administration needs to compromise. Separately, the supreme court released a report into the leak of its draft opinion overturning Roe v Wade, and said they could not figure out who did it.
Here’s what else happened today:
Joe Biden remains unpopular, a new poll found, but the president still reportedly plans to announce his re-election campaign soon.
The debt ceiling gets the New Yorker treatment, for better or worse.
The top Senate Democrat and the head of America’s largest bank both warned of the consequences of breaching the borrowing limit, while the Senate Republican leader sounded optimistic a deal would be reached.
As eager as some in Washington may be to fight over the debt ceiling, Edward Helmore reports that the head of America’s largest bank has warned of the consequences of a protracted standoff:
The US should not be “playing games” with the debt ceiling, the JP Morgan chief executive, Jamie Dimon, warned warring US political factions on Thursday as a heated row over the federal borrowing limit reached a crisis point.
“We should never question the creditworthiness of the US government. That is sacrosanct and it should never happen,” Dimon said on Thursday in an interview on CNBC. “This is not something we should be playing games with at all.”
Dimon’s comments came as the US treasury department announced later Thursday it would take steps to keep paying the federal government’s bills as the US hit its $31.4tn debt limit as expected.
