With a little more than a fortnight to go before the government shuts down once more in the absence of a budget deal, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has publicly touted bringing a debt ceiling deal into the mix of border security negotiations. This should really go without saying, but adding even more brinkmanship into Republicans' common sense compromise is a terrible call.

For one thing, Democrats successfully called President Trump's bluff in the shutdown. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., simply waited out the five-week political faux pas, banking on the fact that the public would blame Trump for making what essentially amounted to an eleventh hour demand. Although Trump's actual demands were sensible enough, just one billion dollars more for border security than Democrats pushed for in the Gang of Eight bill in 2013, Pelosi successfully framed the narrative not as Democratic obstruction but Republicans holding the government hostage. And she won.

The debt ceiling issue will arise on its own in March, and Congress will have to vote on authorizing the government to borrow money and pay back its debts. Our skyrocketing national debt is a ticking time bomb of its own, one now much greater than our annual gross domestic product and reaching a proportion of our economy not seen in almost a century. Social security, which Trump has foolishly promised not to touch, will become insolvent in just 15 years, and Medicare is currently spending more than three times per capita of what its recipients paid into it.

But the solution to our egregious national debt is not to default on our loans, or even to threaten to.

Any further manipulation of the debt ceiling would backfire. Republicans want a physical barrier along the southern border as well as extra funding for courts and personnel, but they've made clear that they're open to issuing major concessions to the Democrats to get it. And if you support both letting the people already here stay and preventing new illegal immigrants from coming in, Trump's compromise makes sense. Granting a sizable DACA extension — a constitutional one this time — or amnesty cannot be done so long as the border remains so permeable without incentivizing further illegal immigration. And Democrats would be dumb to give Trump his key campaign promise without demanding a permanent and legal solution to the fates of DACA recipients and temporary protected status holders.

Trump's problem right now is one of messaging. He's logically correct in his compromise, or at least the direction that he's going in. He's no longer withholding pay from 800,000 federal workers. If Pelosi refused to name her price when Trump has made his inelasticity of demand so apparent, it means one of two things: She's an actual open borders extremist who's made a full 180 on the importance of sovereignty and law enforcement, or she cares about "Dreamers" so little that she'd rather blow a once-in-an-administration opportunity to secure their destinies forever.

This is the story Republicans need to be telling. But to add an issue as economically threatening and politically toxic as the debt ceiling into the mix would only complicate the story, not clarify it.