Has Kevin McCarthy won the war over spending cuts with Joe Biden? Not yet. But the new Republican Speaker has forced Biden to the negotiating table, and that’s at least a tactical victory.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen announced yesterday that the US would hit its debt limit sooner than expected, and perhaps as soon as June 1. The Biden administration clearly hoped that the advancing deadline would force McCarthy to retreat and pass a “clean” debt-ceiling hike. Instead, McCarthy pointed out that the House had already passed a bill to avoid default that Biden and Chuck Schumer were ignoring. “The Senate and the President need to get to work — and soon,” McCarthy announced while on a CODEL to Israel.

A few hours later, Biden reversed his weeks-long refusal to negotiate terms on a debt-ceiling hike:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has accepted an invitation to meet with President Joe Biden on May 9 about the debt ceiling, according to a source familiar, setting the stage for a high-stakes moment in the debt ceiling standoff.

Biden invited all four Congressional leaders to the meeting. …

Following the bill’s passage in the House, Biden told reporters he would be “happy to meet with McCarthy, but not on whether or not the debt limit gets extended.” The White House has maintained that the president would only accept a clean proposal to raise the nation’s borrowing limit.

Well, that strategy didn’t work, did it? Biden and Schumer had apparently bet that McCarthy couldn’t get his fractious caucus to come together to pass a debt-ceiling hike on its own, and that McCarthy would beg for Democrats’ assistance to pass a clean hike at some point. One can understand why they believed McCarthy would fail; it took 15 ballots to win the Speaker election.

Instead, McCarthy won, and made it look relatively easy. Even the four Republicans who refused to vote for the bill were impressed by McCarthy’s leadership, even if they didn’t support the policy. And with that win, McCarthy effectively dumped the debt-ceiling mess in the laps of Biden and Schumer and made their refusal to negotiate the crisis point.

Not a bad start to McCarthy’s speakership era.

Even with that, it took several days for Biden and Schumer to catch up to reality. After Yellen raised the stakes yesterday and McCarthy called her bluff, though, Biden had no choice but to blink.

So what will McCarthy win in the end? Biden and Schumer won’t just roll over for the House bill passed last week, but clearly they plan to offer something, or there would be no point in setting up the meeting with McCarthy and Mitch McConnell. Just the fact that Biden has now agreed to talks on the parameters of a debt-ceiling hike means that McCarthy will get some sort of spending cuts, even if it’s not everything he got passed in the original bill. Biden and Schumer will try to pose as tough guys, but even some of Schumer’s caucus has openly wondered why neither man will talk with the duly elected leadership of a chamber of Congress on an important national policy.

Biden blinked. McCarthy forced him to do so. And as a result, we may actually see at least some rollback of the massive spending spree of Biden and the Democrats.