House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., told Newsmax on Tuesday he is confident the House Rules Committee will pass the deal he struck with President Joe Biden to avoid a debt default by the U.S. government and expects the full House to vote on the proposal Wednesday night.
"It will get out of the Rules Committee," McCarthy told "The Record With Greta Van Susteren."
McCarthy has a 72-hour rule where lawmakers and the public get to read a bill before it is voted on by the full House. Under his predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., House members typically voted on bills before reading them.
"This isn't a 1,000-page bill," McCarthy said. "This is simply 99 pages, 15 of it is of rescissions of those things that we are pulling back money from, like the CDC Global Fund, the $400 million from hardworking taxpayers going to China, the COVID money that has sat out there, pulling it back. I want everybody to be able to read it and vote on it, so we'll vote on it sometime after [7 p.m. Wednesday]."
McCarthy said what he is most happy about the deal is that it cuts $2.1 trillion if targets are met over the next six years. But only two of those years are binding under the deal.
"This will be the largest cut in American history that we're able to do," McCarthy said. "And if you think for one moment we're how we were back in February, where the president said he would never talk to me, he would not negotiate, that this just had to be a clean debt ceiling where you just raise the debt ceiling.
"And I was only able to debate about 11% of our overall budget because he eliminated discussions of anything else. That is a pretty big cut being the largest that we've ever had before."
The deal suspends the federal debt ceiling through Jan. 1, 2025, after the 2024 elections. McCarthy is banking on Republicans maintaining control of the House, retaking the Senate and winning the White House in 2024 to deal with a pending debt ceiling increase on Jan. 2, 2025.
"My idea there is that we have a Republican Senate, Republican president, and we could take the next step of what we're doing here of being able to cut even further and put us on a path to a balanced budget," McCarthy said, adding there are no tax increases and no new government programs in the debt deal.
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