ANY JOURNALIST, save this one, could tell you: a little deadline pressure can be helpful. But this principle can, like most, be taken to insanity. Consider the pathological case of Congress under divided government, which often functions by wiring time bombs and sitting idly by until the countdown ticks close to zero. The present showdown over the debt ceiling, a statutory limit on the amount of money the Treasury can borrow, illustrates this worryingly well.

After the federal government hit its limit of $31.4trn in January, the Treasury entered into a number of “extraordinary measures” (which, despite the name, are now routine) meant to avoid a sovereign default. Republicans led by Kevin McCarthy (pictured), the speaker of the House of Representatives, promised to withhold the votes necessary to increase the limit unless the White House accepted budgetary concessions. For months the position of President Joe Biden was, in essence, to refuse to negotiate with economic terrorists. But as the “X-date”—the drop-dead day when the accounting tricks ran out—of early June approached, Mr Biden began bartering. The two sides announced a compromise deal over the weekend, leaving just enough time for Congress to pass it. But it will still take days of delicate work before the bomb can be defused.

The trickiest moment is expected tonight, when Mr McCarthy brings the deal up for a vote in the House. He faces a brewing rebellion within his own caucus of hardline members who believe that he scored an insufficiently favourable deal with the White House. Mr McCarthy had a tortured route to power, having to endure a humiliating series of 15 votes in January, when hardliners demanded concessions in exchange for his accession. One of those concessions was a pledge to push an austere line in the debt-ceiling negotiations.

The initial Republican proposal was certainly sweeping—demanding significant reductions on spending; a gutting of the climate subsidies created as part of the Inflation Reduction Act; and the imposition of work requirements for Medicaid, the health-insurance programme for the poor. But the final deal is a pale shadow of that. It in effect freezes non-defence spending for only two years, but, rather importantly, at the level of the 2023 fiscal year, after Mr Biden’s spending spree had begun. Some overexuberant expenditures have been clawed back, but the president’s previous legislative accomplishments have mostly survived. The deal imposes modestly tighter work requirements on recipients of nutrition assistance and welfare, but does not remake the safety net. The Congressional Budget Office, a non-partisan scorekeeper, estimates that the deal would cut deficits by $1.5trn over a decade, 0.4% of GDP (though the real reduction may end up short of that because spending caps are enforceable for only two years).

Many members of Mr McCarthy’s own party will vote against the compromise. “Republicans got outsmarted by a president who can’t find his pants,” tweeted Nancy Mace, a representative from South Carolina. At least one, Dan Bishop, threatened to call a motion to remove Mr McCarthy from the speakership.

In private conversations the speaker has predicted that two-thirds of House Republicans would go along with the deal. The plain maths in an almost evenly divided chamber means that only one-third of House Democrats would then need to support it for the compromise bill to pass—a margin that would be easy to obtain. Progressives are certainly not thrilled about the deal struck by Mr Biden and Mr McCarthy. “They have further cemented elite beliefs that the debt ceiling is the most important rule under the US code or constitution,” argues Jeff Hauser of the Revolving Door Project, a good-government group. Mr Hauser would rather have seen the Biden administration contest the legality of the debt ceiling in court than agree to what are real-terms spending cuts because of high inflation.

The left wing of the Democratic Party may grumble—particularly about the sweetheart provision approving a new natural-gas pipeline in West Virginia—but that is unlikely to seriously threaten the legislation. If the Republican insurrection gets any larger, however, Mr McCarthy may find himself in trouble (as would the legislation). An informal rule within the party states that only bills that command a “majority of the majority” ought to be brought to the floor for a vote. Defying this rule has had dangerous consequences for past Republican speakers: John Boehner found his tenure increasingly intolerable after relying on Democratic votes to secure must-pass legislation.

And at this point, it is certainly must-pass. There has been little effort to draft a short-term debt increase that would postpone the question for a few more weeks. However big the consequences for Mr McCarthy, the deal would almost certainly arrive on Mr Biden’s desk if the House does what it is expected to do and passes it. Senate Republicans are putting up much less of a fuss. Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader, has come out strongly in favour. Irate members of the party may throw up some procedural delays, but those would not change the outcome. Of course, that does not mean that the cycle of brinkmanship and threats of economic self-destruction would end. The deal would increase the debt limit only until January 1st 2025—at which point it would all start again.■