Biden stays out of public spotlight as shutdown negotiations spiral and deadline looms

President Joe Biden is choosing to stay out of the public spotlight in what could emerge one of the final domestic crises of his presidency, as the White House and Democrats in Washington are portraying a looming government shutdown as a problem for Republicans to resolve on their own.

President Joe Biden is choosing to stay out of the public spotlight in what could emerge one of the final domestic crises of his presidency, as the White House and Democrats in Washington are portraying a looming government shutdown as a problem for Republicans to resolve on their own. The funding crisis escalated on Wednesday after Trump issued a missive that sharply criticized a funding deal that he viewed as too favorable toward Democratic priorities. The deal, which was negotiated by Johnson, would have kept the government funded until March. Trump’s undermining of the deal calls into question the president-elect’s support for Johnson in a speaker’s race in the New Year. As the likelihood of a shutdown intensified on Thursday, Hill Democrats and the White House sought to amplify the real-world impact such a scenario would have on tens of millions of Americans — and not just those government workers who risk missing a paycheck. A key goal for Democrats, sources said, is to demonstrate how much individual states would lose on important things like disaster relief if a funding plan were to fall through. White House officials declined to say what role, if any, Biden himself was personally playing this week to try to remedy the situation, but he had no public events on his public schedule on Thursday as he prepared to return from Wilmington to the White House. The crisis is, at this point, an intra-party fight between congressional Republicans and President-elect Donald Trump and his inner circle. It’s also not clear what kind of public pressure Biden could muster toward Republicans given that he, like Congress, is deeply unpopular — his approval rating sits at 37%, according to CNN’s Poll of Polls. The White House has been happy to let the Republicans in Congress fight it out. “It’s in the Hill’s hands,” a senior White House official told CNN when asked about the possibility that a deal brokered by House Speaker Mike Johnson could collapse in the face of opposition from Republican members and Trump’s inner circle.