Only Mitch McConnell Can Save the US From Default
House Speaker Kevin McCarthy got a bill passed, but it will take the Senate minority leader to make a deal with President Joe Biden.
The only man who can get it done.
Photographer: Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images North AmericaAmerica is hurtling toward a historic and potentially cataclysmic default — and its best hope for avoiding it may be one of the least popular men in Washington: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Don’t mistake last week’s passage of a plan to raise the debt ceiling for progress. The bill, passed by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives on a party-line vote, is dead on arrival in the Democratic-controlled Senate, and as of this writing there are no serious negotiations among any of the relevant players. Among the Senate staffers I’ve spoken to, the prevailing view is that nobody is going to move unless Wall Street starts panicking. Financial markets, meanwhile, have seen this story before, and seem confident it will get resolved one way or another so there’s no need to panic.