US President Joe Biden is pandering with "white supremacists" and "hostage takers" by negotiating with Republicans to lift the debt ceiling, an academic says.
Biden skipped a summit of the 'Quad' group of Asia-Pacific nations — which includes Australia, India and Japan — in Sydney earlier this week ahead of the G7 summit for another round of talks with Republican House of Representatives Speaker Kevin McCarthy on raising the federal borrowing limit from $1.1 trillion to $1.5 trillion.
Republicans want the government to cut public spending in return for permission to borrow more. But Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has warned it might default on existing debts or social security payments if the crisis is not resolved by June 1.
Dr Robert Hockett told Sputnik he was "very worried" about the cross-party talks.
"I'm not sure whether Biden might actually be compromising with some of these reactionaries who are, in effect, hostage taking," Hockett said.
The academic stressed that not raising the borrowing cap would leave the government unable to pay for programs that had already been budgeted for and approved.
"The debt that we're talking about here is already owed. That is legislated debt. That is essentially the upshot of last year's Congress-passed budget. So, in effect, with this rump faction of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives is doing is threatening to renege or to default on its own debt that it itself incurred, thereby, of course, catastrophically destroying the American economy."
The law professor even compared Biden's talks with the Republican leadership to politicians who negotiate with terrorists.
"It seems to me that Biden might be compromising with or in effect, rewarding hostage taking, and he is rewarding kidnapers if he compromises in any way with these people," Hockett said.
He feared that the compromises under discussion could include "unbelievably draconian cuts to various forms of social spending that are benefiting all sorts of non-wealthy Americans."
The commentator said it was "horrifying" that Biden was talking to "white-supremacist neo-Confederate, Jim Crow Republicans" — forgetting that the Democrats were the party of slavery and the Jim Crow segregation laws.
Another fear of progressives was that "Biden will be just as dreadful, just as awful as many of us feared he might be when he first announced in 2019," Hockett said, although they were "sort of relieved to see that maybe he wasn't when he actually started doing some decent things once he took the White House."
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