Republicans want to take away your entitlement programs, can Biden stop them?

During his State of the Union address last Tuesday, President Joe Biden warned his Republican colleagues against any attempts to sunset Medicare and Social Security benefits under his watch. 

“Instead of making the wealthy pay their fair share, some Republicans—some Republicans want Medicare and Social Security to sunset,” Biden bellowed. 

“Those benefits belong to the American people,” the president added. "They earned it. And if anyone tries to cut Social Security… I’ll stop them. I’ll veto it.”

Biden may have been making reference to recent rumblings from House Speaker Kevin McCarthy about using the country’s looming debt crises to wring entitlement concessions out of Biden in exchange for a deal on raising the debt ceiling.

“McCarthy plans to demand several spending cuts in exchange for a deal with President Joe Biden to raise the debt ceiling,” Forbes journalist Nichlass Reimann wrote in late January.

In October, McCarthy allegedly won his speakership on the back of promises to negotiate entitlement cuts with Biden over the debt crisis according to Bloomberg News. But Biden made it clear in his speech that he isn’t going to let anyone take a stab at cutting funding for America’s entitlement programs. 

“I'm not going to allow them to... be taken away,” Biden said triumphantly. “Not today. Not tomorrow. Not ever.” And judging by the noises in the crowd, many Republicans seemed to have agreed with him during his speech. 

McCarthy himself appeared to have reluctantly agreed late last month when he said he was taking plans to cut Medicare and Social Security off the negotiating table while speaking on Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan. 

Unfortunately, the Republican party has a long history of targeting America’s entitlement programs, here are just a few things some of the country’s most prominent Republicans have said about cutting your entitlements. 

The most recent Republican scheme to cut federal entitlement programs and cut government spending came from Rick Scott last year when he unveiled his 11-point plan that called for Medicare and Social Security to sunset in five years according to Newsweek.

“All federal legislation sunsets in 5 years,” Scott’s 11 Point Plan to Rescue America read. “If a law is worth keeping, Congress can pass it again.”

While Mitch McConnell seemed to enthusiastically support Biden’s State of the Union comments, the current Senate Minority Leader has been very vocal in the past about his opposition to America’s entitlement programs. 

“I think it’s pretty safe to say that entitlement changes, which is the real driver of the debt by any objective standard, may well be difficult, if not impossible, to achieve when you have unified government,” McConnell said in 2018, essentially saying he would cut entitlements if he had a unified government. 

Powerful Republicans like Marco Rubio, Mike Lee, Lindsey Graham, John Thune, Ron Johnson, and the Republican Study Committee have all gone on record stating that programs like Medicare and Social Security need to be cut, changed, or reduced in scale according to Insider’s Kelsey Vlamis. 

If Congressional Republicans try to cut Medicare and Social Security spending Biden can veto their attempts. Biden could also find new ways to fund America's entitlement programs, but that poses its own problems...

Making changes like expanding the Medicare Trust Fund—a promise Biden made during a speech in Florida on Thursday—could be extremely helpful in saving the program. But it would almost certainly need to be funded by increasing Medicare’s payroll tax, something that could lose him in the 2024 election…