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you re live in the cnn newsroom. i m jim acosta in washington. we begin with president biden playing salesman in chief. the white house has been briefing house and senate democrats on the tentative deal to raise the nation s debt ceiling. a source says that a midafternoon phone call between president biden and house spe speaker kevin mccarthy has not happened yet. the call was to finalize the remaining details. experts say a default would be disastrous for the u.s. and global economies and that threat is still looming ominously at this hour. on capitol hill, lawmakers sound like they re unhappy with this deal. so passage is not guaranteed yet. this is unfolding as a june 5th deadline is drawing closer. we re following all of these latest developments. priscilla alvarez is at the white house for us. what are you learning about this phone call? is it going to happen? there s ever expectation that it is going to happen, jim. as you mentioned, president biden had said ....
i want to be very clear that the president put out his budget and it wasn t for another month after that that the that the republicans default on america bill came out. and so until we had both budgets essentially, the republican blueprint which wanted to slash veterans funding, slash funding for children and seniors versus the president s budget, once we had those two documents, we were able to move forward. but this agreement, let me tell you when i heard my colleagues who are airing their views on this deal say that there were no democratic wins, that is simply not true. there was a bill, the veterans the military construction and veterans affair bill that was supposed to be marked thup week. i m the ranking member and that markup was canceled because the republicans were about to slash ....
Members in the house have been having some choice words for all of this. speaker mccarthy faces key tests, one on tuesday and the expected big vote on wednesday. and then there s what may be happening in the senate as well. there s a lot of hurdles to get through. this is a key test for mccarthy indeed, jim, because part of securing the speakership, he had to make this concession of putting the far right members of his conference on the powerful house rules committee. and we know that that bill can t make it to the floor unless it gets through the rules committee. two members of that committee already throwing cold water on this deal. you ve got congressman ralph norman calling this insanity and chip roy saying you can t make this crap up. that is a hurdle he has to overcome. what we re seeing from both sides, the leadership teams, they re really trying to put positive framing on this. but it s going to come down to ....
Bill of tax cuts that they wouldn t touch mostly that went to millionaires and wealthy people. and that was off limits in those discussions which is outrageous. when you have tax cuts, you re pulling revenue out of the economy and that counts just as much as spending. and the republicans under donald trump didn t pay for any of that. we were operating in a situation where we had to protect veterans funding which they were willing to cut, we had to make sure that we had the kind of cuts that were draconian. we ended up at fy-21 levels. i know the details and i know the granularity of it. at the end of the day when we go through the appropriations process, we ll be at fy-23 levels. we re protecting and ensuring that we don t go through this again next year. quick follow up on what the president had to say congresswoman. ....
The rank-and-file members. they are going to be the decisions the decisionmakers here. let s take a listen to speaker mccarthy and hakeem jeffries today. this is a good, strong bill that the majority of republicans will vote for. the agreement that was reached by president biden does several important things, in addition to avoiding a devastating default that would hurt everyday americans, it protects social security, it protects medicare, it protects medicaid, it protects veterans. so this if makes it through the house, which we know is a high bar and gets to the senate, it s going to face some issues there. we ve already heard from several republican senators, susan collins, lindsey graham voicing concerns about defense spending. and i ve been hearing from progressives all day who have real concerns about this change in the work requirement for benefits. thinking that this was not even on the table. ....