WASHINGTON (MarketWatch)—The U.S. government has run into the legal limit on how much it can borrow, but don’t expect a whole lot of fireworks again in Congress over what’s become a frequently quarrelsome issue.

The U.S. debt limit went into effect on Monday after a one-year suspension, with a ceiling of around $18 trillion. Treasury Secretary Jack Lew on Friday urged John Boehner, the Republican speaker of the House, to raise the debt limit as quickly as possible and not to allow the issue to become a political football.

“The creditworthiness of the United States is not a bargaining chip, and I again urge Congress to address this matter without controversy or brinksmanship,” Lew wrote in a second letter to Boehner in two weeks.

Americans and foreign investors need not worry, though. The U.S. Treasury has the means to keep funding the government until October through the use of so-called extraordinary measures, the Congressional Budget Office estimates. And the Bipartisan Policy Center in a new report suggests a breach in the debt limit could be put off potentially until the end of the December.

What’s more, the leader of the U.S. Senate, Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, insists he won’t let the government default or shut down amid negotiations with the White House on raising the debt limit.

That’s good news for the nation’s bondholders or anyone dependent on the feds for support, such as retirees receiving Social Security or other benefits, because it means the government will continue to pay its bills on time.

The modern-day debt limit, which has been in place since World War II, caps how much money the government can borrow. The limit has been raised about a hundred times since the 1950s, but it’s become the source of increasingly hostile political tug-of-wars since the mid-1990s.

In 2011, congressional Republicans temporarily put off an increase in the debt limit as part of an effort to force President Barack Obama to accept the large budget cuts to which he objected.

Yet the dispute alarmed investors all over the world and caused the U.S. economy to stall, eventually pressuring both parties to agree to a compromise that raised the limit in exchange for federal spending cuts. The debt limit has been suspended several times since because Washington could not resolve disputes about how to manage the government’s budget.

Even if McConnell sticks to his vow, there’s no guarantee the Republican-controlled House will go along. The House almost cut off funding for the Homeland Security Department last month over an unrelated dispute over Obama’s new policy to treat some illegal immigrants more leniently.

At the very least, another potential debt-ceiling fight will be put off until the fall. That’ll give the U.S. economy more breathing room to grow and let the Federal Reserve determine whether to raise interest rates without worrying about what Congress will do.