President Joe Biden and his allies at the Washington Post are in a tough spot. They assumed for months that House Republicans would fail to pass legislation that raised the debt limit, thus requiring Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to step in and find 10 Republican votes for a clean debt limit hike.
This is completely disingenuous. Of course Republicans didn’t issue demands to Trump — he was the leader of their party. And while it is technically true that Democrats “supplied their votes in a bid to avert a crisis,” what the Washington Post very dishonestly leaves out is that Democrats refused to give Trump a clean debt limit hike and extracted significant concessions from him in negotiations.
That 2017 debt limit deal ended up including $15 billion in additional spending demanded by the Democrats. So no, there was nothing clean about that.