After midnight on July 31st, the federal government reached the $28.5 trillion debt limit, which is the amount of money Congress allows the Treasury Department to borrow to keep the government running. Since then, Treasury has relied on bookkeeping gimmicks—known in bureaucratese as “extraordinary measures”—to shuffle existing funds and thereby keep the government fiscally afloat. These extraordinary measures, however, are a stopgap. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen yesterday estimated that incoming receipts will be insufficient to pay daily obligations sometime “during the month of October.”

In two ways, this news is scary.

First, the debt, per se, is disconcerting, as it amounts to almost $231,000 for every household in America. In prior posts, my colleague Chris Edwards has explained why we should all be concerned about the ballooning balance on our country’s credit card.

Second, the federal government would roil financial markets if it started defaulting on its obligations. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, testified that this would engender a “cascading catastrophe of unbelievable proportions.” Moody’s warned of a “fiscal Armageddon.”

If the debt limit news is scary, then Congress’s response has been downright terrifying.

Ten days after exceeding the debt limit, the Senate passed the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act, including $500 billion of new spending on roads, broadband, and the electric grid. Because this spending isn’t fully offset by new revenues, the bill would add a quarter trillion dollars to the deficit, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Nineteen Republicans joined all 50 Democratic Senators in supporting the legislation. Then they all went on their annual August recess.

Thus, the Senate reacted to the debt limit emergency by adding more to the national debt and then leaving for vacation. Isn’t that irresponsible? Mind you, we’re talking about the upper chamber of Congress, where common sense is much more likely to prevail than in the House of Representatives.

Behind the scenes, you’d think that Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer is sweating the debt ceiling, right? After all, there’s a “fiscal Armageddon” looming next month. But raising the limit (or controlling spending) isn’t now the Senate’s priority–far from it. Instead, Schumer’s office is leading an all‐hands‐on‐deck effort to move $3.5 trillion in new spending, including up to $1.75 trillion in deficit spending, on top of the $500 billion in new spending (and $250 billion in deficit spending) in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. Incredibly, the $3.5 trillion number reflects a compromise with progressive lawmakers, led by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who pushed for at least $6 trillion (and up to $10 trillion) in new spending.

For its part, the House of Representatives is along for the ride. Before departing on the chamber’s own August recess, Speaker Nancy Pelosi scheduled a late‐September vote on the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. At present, House staffers, like their counterparts in the Senate, have been working nonstop on legislation to spend another $3.5 trillion.

You might be thinking, “where does the debt limit factor into all this new spending?” As a political football, of course!

For progressives now ascendant in Congress, it’s an article of faith that deficits don’t matter and that the debt ceiling is a dangerous distraction. Nevertheless, congressional Democrats last month passed up opportunities to unilaterally raise the limit. Instead, House and Senate leadership wants to provide political cover for moderate Democrats by forcing a bipartisan vote. To this end, Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Schumer are employing a brinksmanship strategy. They say they won’t act without Republican support.

But Republican leaders want nothing to do with such a vote, preferring for Democrats to “own” the deficit. And if GOP leadership were coming at this issue in earnest, with an eye to controlling federal spending, then they could be applauded. Alas, they’re not. As I observed above, 19 Republican Senators just voted for $250 billion of new deficit spending on infrastructure, after the federal government had exceeded the debt ceiling. More broadly, the GOP was fine with hiking the debt limit when Trump occupied the Oval Office—even before the pandemic.

The upshot is that both parties come to this game of chicken from a cynical and unserious place.

Where is this headed? I don’t think brinksmanship could work for Pelosi and Schumer. Given that Democrats hold majorities in the House and Senate, they can’t blame Republicans for inaction.

Reportedly, Pelosi and Schumer are mulling multiple other options. One pathway is for Democrats to attach the debt ceiling hike to a bill that Republicans would suffer politically for opposing, such as emergency funding for vitims of Hurricane/Tropical Storm Ida.

Another approach involves a Rube Goldberg decision‐making mechanism meant to obfuscate accountability, whereby responsibility for raising the debt ceiling would get watered down between the executive and legislative branches of government. Here’s how this scheme would work, according to Roll Call:

The procedure would give the White House the ability to waive the federal borrowing cap unilaterally, but give Congress a veto if lawmakers could muster the votes to block it. Even then the president would have the option of vetoing the resolution of disapproval, and it would take two‐thirds of both chambers to override a veto.

This last measure seems most likely, if only because it best facilitates an escape from political accountability. Such is our contemporary Congress.