Washington made an agreement that congressmen will vote on as early as today. The country awaits to see what sits behind door number one in this real-life version of Let’s Make a Deal.

The thumbs down or thumbs up awarded to the debt-ceiling deal stems as much from one’s political vantage point as it does from expectations. Does one judge the results against existing spending or against the deal one wanted?

“The Fiscal Responsibility Act will likely be the largest deficit reduction law in almost a dozen years,” Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget said in a release from the group. “It will help the Federal Reserve fight inflation and begin to make progress in addressing our mounting national debt. The legislation will reestablish some discipline in the appropriations process, impose constraints on costly executive actions, reduce unnecessary spending and, importantly, raise the debt limit and avoid default.”

Rep. Bob Good of Virginia voiced opposition.

“No, I think it was an abysmal failure on the part of Republican leadership,” the Freedom Caucus member told WSET ABC 13. “Quite honestly, this is a deal that we could have gotten with a Democratic majority. There is no defense or excuse for raising the debt limit to January ’25 with almost no conditions there.”

Both Good and MacGuineas profess to want more fiscal discipline yet issue conflicting verdicts on the bill. Could this stem from the fact that, even with three days to read just 99 pages, the country cannot tell from the text just what the bill means?

If House Speaker Kevin McCarthy negotiated this deal with the person reading this, then one imagines it would turn out quite differently than the bill that actually emerged. Of course, McCarthy dealt with Joe Biden, and not an impotent Joe Biden but one whose party controls the Senate and remains a handful of votes away from controlling the House. Joe Biden sees the world differently than McCarthy or the reader. All of this means that both sides needed to give up something to obtain a deal.

Republicans allow the national debt to rise to some non-specified amount. The idea of empowering the incontinent politicians largely responsible for putting the nation $32 trillion in the hole to go further into debt seems a bad enough idea. Attaching a cap not to a dollar amount but to a date in early 2025 seems a far worse one. An unwise bartender allows the drunks to set last call and bends whenever they say just one more.

Democrats yield on the bill clawing back an unspecified amount of unobligated funds from the American Rescue Plan, Inflation Reduction Act, CARES Act, and other legislation never deserving to pass in the first place.

“If the covered discretionary administrative action would increase direct spending,” a section titled “Indirect Direct Spending” reads, “the written notice submitted by the head of the agency under paragraph (1) shall include a proposal to undertake 1 or more other administrative actions that would provide a reduction in direct spending greater than or equal to the increase in direct spending attributable to the covered discretionary administrative action.”

That all sounds very good.

The work “requirements” sound good, too, but look in the fine print as quite blah in not instituting much of a change. For instance, a stipulation extends existing welfare work requirements from those under 49 to those under 54. These work “requirements” do not require anyone to work full time, and sundry provisos exist to exempt beneficiaries.

Ditto for the non sequitur inclusion on the Mountain Valley Pipeline. Joe Manchin used this last year as the same “win” that allowed him to cast a vote for the Inflation Reduction Act. The New York Times even headlined its story on the deal in August “Manchin Won a Pledge from Democrats to Finish a Contested Pipeline.” The same “concession” included in the debt-ceiling bill means either Democrats do not honor their pledges, in which case the current pledge means nothing, or Democrats already honored this same pledge last August, in which case the current pledge means nothing.

Ultimately, grounds exist for one to plausibly claim the bill puts the United States on a healthier fiscal trajectory and averts bad, albeit exaggerated, outcomes from government inability to pay for what legislators allocated. But this ignores the elephant — one more bloated than Babar and more out of control than the one shot by a fictional (one guesses) George Orwell — in the room.

The partisans of big government needed this deal. The advocates of limited government did not. The latter held the power. Given this reality, why did not big government receive less?

Beyond this, a Let’s Make a Deal colors all this. We do not know what lurks behind doors one, two, or three. The bill does not specify amounts recoverable from past allocations, parts of the welfare reform section appear amorphous and at the discretion of administrators, and no ceiling, just a date, holds down the debt.

The agreement contains much good. Those wishing to maintain their purity by negatively comparing any real legislation to the ideal floating in their heads risk transitioning from conservative to radical. Few bills in our lifetimes actually suppressed the nation’s bills, so dismissing this legislation without considering its attributes or the alternative seems frivolous.

That said, the people wanting what they do not possess wear silly costumes to play Let’s Make a Deal. Monty Hall and Wayne Brady, the guys who possess what others want, do not need to compromise their dignity.