The drama isn’t over yet. To end the threat of the default, the bill needs to make it through Congress.

With a potential default date just days away, lawmakers have managed to avert economic calamity by coming to a deal in principle to raise the debt ceiling and cap government spending for two years.

While the full details of the bill have not yet emerged, the reported elements of the deal included concessions from both parties, effectively ensuring that lawmakers won’t have to revisit the debt ceiling until after the 2024 presidential election.

Any deal will still have to pass the Republican-controlled House of Representatives and will need to gain 60 votes in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Some conservative House Republicans have already objected to the bill. On Twitter Saturday night, Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) wrote, “I do not like the ‘deal’ as I understand it from the cheerleading so far… I will have more to follow once I see more details.”

In the end, President Joe Biden, though he long said he would not negotiate on government spending alongside the debt ceiling, wound up doing just that. According to the New York Times, he reportedly agreed to both short-term discretionary spending caps and new limits and work requirements for social programs like food stamps and the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) programs. House Republicans, meanwhile, relented on several demands to roll back Democratic policies including changes to Medicaid.

The announcement of a deal defuses longstanding fears about a potential default, which could have led to significant market volatility, spikes in interest rates, and an increase in unemployment. It indicates, too, that the debt ceiling remains a useful bargaining chip for the minority party, adding to years of brinksmanship on this issue, especially by RepublThe agreement also reportedly includes new rules around permitting and reviews for the construction of energy projects.

The debt ceiling has become a blunt political weapon

The standoff that led to this deal is only the latest brinksmanship over the debt ceiling. Because it is must-pass legislation, the debt ceiling has been used by both political parties as leverage for policy demands or as a messaging tool. In the last few decades, however, Republicans have become more aggressive in how close they’ve been willing to push the US toward a default to secure policy wins.

In 2011, the country came within 72 hours of defaulting as congressional leaders worked to ink a deal that included a debt ceiling increase paired with spending caps. This year, a similar scenario played out yet again as Republicans refused to approve a standalone debt increase.

As one former Republican staffer previously told Vox, many in the GOP saw the 2011 debt ceiling negotiations as successful and as one of the few opportunities the party had to push the spending cuts in a time of divided government.

“I think one of the takeaways was that running this play worked, you know, we were able to actually achieve something and use this moment for leverage,” said Brendan Buck, a staffer to House Speaker John Boehner in 2011.

This year’s outcome seems to reaffirm that approach. Although Republicans were forced to make their own serious concessions as part of the discussions, they did secure some key wins that further curb access to social programs, and that roll back investments in non-defense spending.

That said, the question remains whether McCarthy will be able to cobble together a majority of his caucus to support the deal.

The outcome of this year’s negotiations sends a message that the debt ceiling will likely continue to be used as leverage by both parties, and has reignited lawmaker conversations about proposals to change it or get rid of it altogether. Both parties’ concerns about concessions were ultimately outweighed, however, by the fear of a default and the potential of a catastrophic economic crisis. If the agreement passes, it will put the debt ceiling threat out of reach till after the next election.

The case for fixing the debt ceiling through budget reconciliation

The simplest way to change the debt ceiling is through normal legislation. But normal legislation can be delayed through a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 senators to break. Given that there are only 50 Democrats in the Senate, and Senate Republicans likely will be loath to pass legislation that reduces their bargaining power should they one day retake control of the body, abolishing or weakening the debt ceiling through ordinary legislation seems untenable.

The president could also try to de facto abolish the debt ceiling, through a variety of means. The zaniest by far would be to exploit a law passed in 1996, and meant to benefit coin collectors, that lets the secretary of the treasury issue platinum coins of arbitrary value. The treasury secretary could thus mint a coin valued at, say, $1 trillion or $2 trillion, and use it to purchase and pay off an equivalent amount of debt from the Federal Reserve, which currently holds $4.7 trillion in federal Treasury bonds. The move could trigger inflation by expanding the money supply, but it’d keep the US under the statutory debt limit.

Another, less zany move would be for the president to simply announce he’s not honoring the debt ceiling. He could argue that it’s unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment for the US not to honor its debts, and thus that the debt ceiling violates the Constitution; some eminent constitutional law scholars like Yale’s Jack Balkin have backed this argument. He could also argue that the debt limit contradicts other laws passed by Congress specifying a particular amount of spending and taxation, and announce that the “least illegal” thing for him to do would be to honor those spending and taxing laws at the expense of disobeying the debt limit law.

All of these options, however, would amount to a substantial usurpation of power by the executive. They also come with some legal risk, though it’s unclear who exactly would have the standing to challenge such actions in court.

And that brings us to the option I suggest here: raising the debt ceiling through reconciliation legislation. Less fraught than executive action, and more politically realistic than passing ordinary legislation, it’s an option that lawmakers should seriously consider.

Under Senate rules, the Senate can pass as many as three reconciliation bills per budget resolution: one that adjusts taxes, one that adjusts spending, and one that adjusts the debt limit. The reconciliation instructions in the just-passed budget resolution suggest that the same piece of legislation will affect taxes and spending together. The resolution did not include instructions for a change in the debt limit. But Congress could easily amend the legislation to include such instructions, or include them in the forthcoming budget for fiscal year 2022.

What today’s Democrats can do to effectively end the debt ceiling brinkmanship

Under a deal passed in the summer of 2019, the debt ceiling is suspended until the end of July. At that point, if the debt ceiling isn’t raised (and if Treasury doesn’t take extraordinary measures), the US would go into default, likely sparking a global meltdown.

Thankfully, that likely won’t happen — with both houses of Congress in Democratic hands, it’s all but certain that Biden and Congress will be able to raise the debt ceiling anew.

But Democrats have an opportunity right now to do much more than that.

To be clear, federal law suggests that reconciliation legislation — the type of legislation that will come out of today’s Congress — cannot suspend the debt limit until a certain date. It can only increase or decrease the amount of debt specified in the limit. Under Section 310 of the Congressional Budget Act, a reconciliation bill may “specify the amounts by which the statutory limit on the public debt is to be changed,” but not suspension or timing. And if reconciliation bills cannot suspend the debt limit, they certainly cannot abolish it outright.

Alan Frumin, who served as Senate parliamentarian — a nonpolitical expert who advises the body on procedural matters — from 1987 to 1995 and then from 2001 to 2012, affirms that interpretation, telling me in an email that reconciliation bills can raise but not abolish the debt ceiling. “My best guess is that the numerical value of the ceiling could be adjusted to any amount without violating the Byrd Rule, although it is possible that there could be a prohibited (non Byrd) budgetary effect of an increase to a certain level,” Frumin told me. “I also think that the statutory imposition of the debt ceiling per se could not be abolished in a reconciliation bill.”

If the current Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, were to agree with this assessment, the presiding officer of the Senate (most likely Vice President Kamala Harris) could overrule it and declare that under reconciliation, the debt limit can be abolished entirely. But that would involve some procedural norm-breaking that Democrats may want to avoid.

However, there’s a way out of this bind. Call it the Danish option.

As noted above, Denmark is one of the few other nations besides the US to have a legal debt ceiling. But there, the ceiling is not really binding — and not just because the country has a parliamentary system with a single house of parliament that appoints the prime minister, meaning that conflicts between the prime minister and the parliament that elected them are rarer than conflicts between the US president and Congress.

The more important factor that renders is that in 2010, Danish lawmakers consciously raised the ceiling to 2 trillion Danish kroner, more than double the then-current debt level (and way above today’s level, too). The very purpose of this action, Danish economist and Peterson Institute for International Economics fellow Jacob Funk Kirkegaard writes, was to make the debt ceiling a non-factor for the purposes of legislating. The Danes raised it high enough that they didn’t need to worry about it for a long, long time.

Under the Danish option, Biden and his Democratic allies in Congress would raise the debt ceiling to a level high enough that they do not need to worry about it for the foreseeable future. The limit, once it’s un-suspended in August, is expected to be around $27 trillion. Congress could set it at $50 trillion or $100 trillion, or, if it wants to be extra safe, some preposterously large number like $1 googol (also known as $10^88 trillion).

That would effectively eliminate the debt ceiling as a hostage-taking device, at least for a good long while. True, it could also invite misinterpretation: Republicans could claim that Democrats voted to allow tens of trillions of dollars in new debt, which, while technically true, would be wildly misleading.

Sarah Binder, a professor of political science at George Washington University and expert on congressional procedure, notes that reconciliation has only been used four times to raise the debt limit (in 1989, 1990, 1993, and 1997). “My sense is that increased political heat over the debt limit has made reconciliation a less politically viable tool for raising the limit,” she writes in an email. “Not entirely sure why that is, except neither party typically wants to own the increase.”

But Democrats should not let that risk prevent them from disabling the ticking time bomb of the debt limit. There’s a real chance that Republicans will capture one or both houses of Congress in 2022. If they do, the odds of a debt ceiling standoff akin to the one that President Obama faced in 2011 will go way, way up.

America can’t afford to take that risk again. That’s why Jason Furman (who served as Obama’s chief economist) and Rohit Kumar, former domestic policy director for Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, united in 2017 to urge that the debt ceiling be abolished. Kumar and Furman were on opposite sides of the 2011 negotiations but agreed that a crisis like that could not be allowed to repeat itself. Senate Democrats have the power to eliminate the odds of another such crisis. They should use it.