President Joe Biden entered the escalating standoff on Monday to declare that Senate Republicans were being “hypocritical, dangerous, and disgraceful.” White House press secretary Jen Psaki charged that Republicans under President Donald Trump spent like “drunken sailors” and unveiled a chart comparing the debt they incurred. The White House is also planning to dispatch more surrogates to deliver their debt ceiling message on TV this week, with hopes of framing the debate as one between a Senate minority leader blocking avenues to avoid default while the administration offers swift resolutions…

The White House’s new, more combative posture in the debt ceiling standoff is a concession of sorts that their earlier approach has not yielded the desired results. The administration had resisted dealing with the issue through earlier legislative vehicles out of hope that at least 10 Senate Republicans could be pressured by the business community and Wall Street to vote to lift or suspend the debt ceiling to avert a fiscal catastrophe. When that began to look improbable, Democrats tried to do it by majority vote, only to encounter GOP resistance. Now, with the deadline for default less than two weeks away, there is little private or public optimism inside the administration that the resolution will be anything but a nail-biter…

While acknowledging they would far prefer using other avenues, White House officials said Monday that they aren’t ruling out the possibility of raising the debt ceiling though the budget process known as reconciliation, which McConnell has been urging them to do for months. But they’re worried that Republicans, who themselves voted to raise the debt limit by trillions under Trump, will use that opportunity to burn precious floor time in the Senate, and Biden himself described that path as risky, complicated, and cumbersome.