The Obama Administration's Genius Idea on the Debt Ceiling

This is a little lost in the dust of the fiscal cliff negotiations, but the White House's opening bid contains as a sub-theme a really smart idea on the debt ceiling. The debt ceiling, to recall, was for a long time a kind of traditional venue for partisan grandstanding in American politics. And there's nothing wrong with a little grandstanding. There's always a theatrical element to politics, and this was just a part of the way things are done in America. There was even a West Wing scene about it: But in the winter of 2010-11 the debt ceiling became dangerous. Some combination of malign intent on the part of John Boehner and strategic miscalculation on the part of Barack Obama weaponized it. Rather than simply subjecting to the president to a verbal lashing over his desire to raise the debt ceiling, Boehner ended up using the threat of a potentially economy-destroying fiasco to extract...