President Biden has invited Speaker McCarthy to the White House on May 9, but he still says he won’t negotiate a debt ceiling deal. McCarthy should politely decline. He’s holding all the cards.

We don’t usually quote polls at the Hotline, but since the media keeps saying “70% of voters want the debt ceiling raised,” we need to clarify. It turns out more than half of that 70% say they want spending cuts as part of the deal. The media rarely reports that. Even with all the “default” scare tactics, almost one in three Americans are so disgusted with Washington’s overspending that they don’t want Congress to raise the debt ceiling at all.

The worst news of all for Biden is that now even Democrats favor a negotiated deal to cut spending and raise the debt ceiling: