Increasing the debt ceiling will require the votes of Democrats, perhaps giving the minority party a rare opportunity to extract concessions from the majority.

It’s also a chance for Mark Warner, these days busy investigating Russia’s attack on the presidential election, to reprise the fiscal-hawk shtick that lifted him to the Senate in 2008 but about which Gillespie raised enough doubts to come within a percentage point of defeating the Democrat for a second term in 2014.

Gillespie has plenty over which to fret without having to worry about the federal bureaucracy closing just as Virginians are focusing in earnest on their choices for governor.

Gillespie has to answer for Donald Trump in the only Southern state he lost to Hillary Clinton last year. The most Northern of Southern states — in part because the majority of its residents, like Gillespie, moved here from somewhere else — Virginia has become even more hostile to the president since the election.

Pair that growing distaste for Trump with the groaning discontent that a government shutdown would likely engender, especially in the vote-rich, heavily Democratic eastern metropolitan areas, and Gillespie — still struggling to simultaneously stand with, and apart from, Trump — could find himself on the wrong side of a very big blue wave.