Incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has made two major promises as he prepares to take over the Senate: no more shutdowns and no more threats of default.

He succeeded on the shutdown goal last month as Congress bought months of welcome breathing room on government funding, but Republicans’ path toward raising the debt ceiling is clear as mud — an outlook that could set up precisely the risky economic situation McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner hope to avoid when when the government reaches its borrowing limit, likely in the late spring or summer.


Already Republicans are imagining a proposal that trades raising the debt limit for spending cuts, a package that would attract mostly GOP support rather than rely on Democrats to get the job done because the White House and congressional Democrats refuse to negotiate on the debt limit.

But the approach could be difficult to pull off, as Republicans haven’t raised the debt ceiling without the help of Democrats in nearly a decade — setting up a looming threat of more brinkmanship in 2015, despite GOP leaders’ hopes of proving the party can govern responsibly.

“I just think it’s irresponsible to keep issuing blank checks,” said Senate Republican Whip John Cornyn of Texas in an interview, explaining why he wants to negotiate on the debt ceiling. “I’m not worried about it. But it’s going to be one of many challenges.”

The last time a Republican-controlled Washington carried the weight of a debt ceiling lift was in 2006, when 52 Republicans approved a raise of nearly $800 billion that all Senate Democrats opposed.

Senate Republicans were then voting to approve a budget and debt increase for George W. Bush, making the vote palatable enough for GOP debt hawks like former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), now president of The Heritage Foundation, to approve raising the debt ceiling to nearly $9 trillion. In 2015, the GOP Senate and House will seek to increase the country’s borrowing authority for Democratic President Barack Obama — a Republican Congress/Democratic president debt dynamic not seen since 1997, when a balanced budget deal and debt-ceiling increase struck by Democrat Bill Clinton and the congressional GOP was overwhelmingly approved by both chambers.

Yet the politics of the country’s debt, which is now roughly equal to the U.S. gross domestic product, are now exponentially more charged and controversial than during the 1990s, when Senate filibusters were rare and the chamber was known to approve debt limit increases unanimously. Now as Congress bears down on a mid-2015 deadline for raising the debt ceiling, it’s almost guaranteed Obama will need 60 votes in the Senate and 218 in the House — and Republicans need to figure out how to get their members on board with authorizing Obama’s administration to borrow hundreds of billions more dollars over the final chapter of his presidency.

“I would imagine that [Democrats] probably would not be too accommodating to us,” said Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.), a close ally of Boehner. “I don’t want to limit us to how it’s going to happen, but I think it will get raised and it will get raised in a way that forces a majority of the Republicans to support it.”

House Republican leaders relied on Democrats to pull the weight of 2014’s clean debt ceiling increase while Senate Republican leaders, including McConnell and Cornyn, walked the plank for their members to break a filibuster and get the legislation across the finish line on the strength of Democratic votes. But what these votes look like this year is the subject of an active guessing game in the Capitol, with Democrats driven deeper into the minority in the House and handing the keys of the Senate to 54 Republicans in January.

The message from leadership months away from a murky deadline: We got this. But it’s hard to imagine the GOP carrying the full weight of a clean debt limit vote while Obama is still president. So, though the White House is still maintaining it will not negotiate over the debt ceiling, Republicans are beginning to spitball plans that deal with the debt while raising the debt limit — aka spending reductions.

“We ought to have a responsible way to deal with some of the debt,” Cornyn said. “I think there are enough Democrats that care about $18 trillion in debt and no end in sight that we can plan a bipartisan group to send something to the president that can help us make some real progress on the debt.”

The debt limit will technically be reached on March 15, though the Treasury Department’s “extraordinary measures” and springtime tax revenue are expected to buy Congress several months of additional time, with estimates from aides and lawmakers ranging from late spring perhaps into the fall before Congress has to act. Typically, the Treasury Department pushes lawmakers to act more quickly, while congressional leaders often seek to vote at the last minute in order to increase pressure on wavering lawmakers.

Senate Republicans have been in the minority for eight years, with the debt ceiling their only leverage for seeking deficit reduction. Now the GOP will be free to pursue spending bills that tackle the debt separately from the debt limit, giving the party more options than simply demanding cuts as a condition of raising the country’s borrowing authority.

But it will be more difficult for Republicans to immediately reduce spending after Congress sealed a bipartisan deal earlier this month to keep the government open until October based on spending levels supported by congressional Democrats.

“The best way we can handle it is get spending under control. But you’re not going to do that in the short term because the Democrats have got it already set up, a lot of it,” said incoming Republican Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch of Utah, whose committee is responsible for overseeing the debt limit.

If the economy keeps humming, it will give Congress more breathing room on the debt limit, perhaps until as late as fall, when lawmakers will need to put together a new government funding bill. The prospect of linking government funding might give the GOP the best opportunity to adjust spending while lifting the debt ceiling — though that possibility is entirely up to the whims of tax receipts and general economic volatility.

Still, the broad Republican stance remains relatively unchanged from 2011. The party doesn’t want the country to default, but GOP leaders believe that deficits must be decreased to motivate Republicans in Congress to vote for a debt ceiling increase. The question is whether Democrats will get on board — and the message from party leaders in Congress and in the White House is that the debt limit is still not a subject of negotiations after the debt crisis negotiations of 2011 resulted in sequestration’s blunt spending cuts, a sore subject among Democrats.

“Let me just say playing with the debt limit is playing with fire. They’ve learned that in the past, and I hope that lesson has stuck with them,” said Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York, the No. 3 Senate Democrat.

At least one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, expresses openness to the broad contours of Republicans’ goals. The moderate Democrat, still a supporter of the Simpson-Bowles deficit reduction plan abandoned by just about everyone else in Washington, said “you always want to reduce the deficit if you have any common sense about you at all.”

“Sooner or later we’ve got to get later to a balanced budget in this country. You got to be able to live within your means, you’ve got to get your financial house in order,” Manchin said. “So I hope they’re serious about it.”

Republicans’ goals in Congress don’t perfectly align with an 100-day benchmark, but leaders are eyeing five hurdles that they believe will define their majority in the eyes of voters in the few months ahead, before the presidential race takes center stage. The party will have to make another “doc fix” to soften Medicare payment changes to health care providers, rally around a budget, hew to their promises to develop 12 spending bills dedicated to each plank of the federal government and figure out a way to pay for billions in infrastructure.

Looming at the end of that is the debt limit, a bright exclamation point that’s sure to serve up a fresh round of drama on Capitol Hill.

“Hopefully we can get them all done in a way that people look at and say: ‘This is better than this has been handled in a long time,’” said Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of GOP leadership and a former House leader.

Carrie Budoff Brown contributed to this report.