Senate Republicans expected to block bill to suspend debt ceiling in key vote
CNN
The Senate is slated to take a procedural vote Wednesday on whether to advance a House-passed bill to suspend the nation's debt limit until December 2022, but Republicans are expected to block the measure.
Pressure is intensifying on lawmakers to ward off an impending financial crisis, but Democrats and Republicans remain locked in a stalemate over how to address the debt limit as the clock ticks down to a potential default. The US could be just a little over a week away from defaulting on its debt for the first time ever.
Republicans say that Democrats, who control both chambers of Congress and the White House, should act alone without GOP votes using a process known as budget reconciliation. Democrats have been outraged over the GOP position, arguing that the debt limit is a shared bipartisan responsibility and so far largely dismissing the possibility of using reconciliation, saying that would be lengthy and unwieldy and the risk of miscalculation is too high.
President Joe Biden asserted Friday that Hamas has been degraded to a point where it can no longer carry out the type of attack that launched the current 8-month conflict in Gaza, laying out a three-phase proposal Israel has submitted to wind down the grinding crisis as he declared, “It’s time for this war to end.