This is Not the End Game

One argument, I think, in favor of not reaching any sort of legislative agreement on raising the debt limit in the next few days is that once we've set the precedent of using this sort of manufactured, idiotic crisis as a forum for hostage-style leveraging and concession-extracting, there will come a time when agreement cannot be reached. It is impossible that playing a game of iterated chicken over the debt ceiling will not end in a failure to agree, eventually. So eventually we're going to have to hit the real End Game of that time-lapse battle, which as I see it ends in one of only a handful of ways:

1. Congress abolishes the debt ceiling.
2. The prior tradition of not using debt ceiling votes to extract policy concessions is re-established.
3. We hit the debt ceiling hard, and assorted economic calamities ensue.
4. Some kind of creative use of executive power effectively nullifies the debt ceiling.

That one of these four options is the necessary end result of this game is not something we can change in the next week. We can change whether the time at which we hit the end game is right now or not, and right now it looks like it won't be right now. But we're going to hit one of those four possible results sooner or later. I'm not sure I can see any particular reason to favor doing so later.