(Larry Downing/REUTERS)

House Speaker John Boehner apparently thinks he has to play tough now to keep the tea party furies out of his hair.

The next battle will be over raising the debt ceiling, and the Obama administration wants a "clean bill" sent to the Hill for an up-or-down vote. That is, a bill without attachments such as the one that would have cut off federal money for women's health and reproductive services by defunding Planned Parenthood or keeping the Environmental Protection Agency from regulating greenhouse gases or something else on the Republicans' radical agenda. The day after making a deal with the Democrats that kept a potential government shutdown at bay, Boehner delivered an address to a Republcian crowd at the annual Prescott Bush fund-raising dinner in Stamford, Conn.:

"The president says, 'I want you to send me a clean bill,'" Boehner said. "Well, guess what, Mr. President, not a chance you're going to get a clean bill. And I can just tell you this. There will not be an increase in the debt limit without something really, really big attached to it."

The Speaker wouldn't specify what the Republicans would demand this time around. Let me guess. It won't be something from the really, really big Pentagon budget that consumes 58 percent of discretionary spending.

Boehner said he never intended for the budget battle to result in a shutdown of the federal government. The lengthy negotiations that took place indicate the political vulnerability of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he said. "There's 23 Democratic Senate seats up for election in 2012 and only 10 Republican seats," Boehner said. "The point I'm trying to make is no one knows where the center of gravity is in the American Senate today. And I think Harry Reid has a pretty weak hand. It was one of the reasons this negotiation took as long as it did. Because they had no positions."

If that perception of weakness and the flames Boehner received from his right flank after the last-minute deal Friday pushes him to another round of who blinks first over the debt ceiling, the stakes will be a lot higher than last week. Now we're talking government default, something that's never happened in the nation's history.

On Face the Nation Sunday, New York Sen. Chuck Schumer said the GOP tactic could be bad news if actually carried out:

"Speaker Boehner had to keep [budget] negotiations going to the last minute to show the Tea Party people he was doing everything he could," Schumer said of last week's down-to-the-wire debate over funding the federal government through the end of the 2011 fiscal year. "You cannot do that with the debt ceiling. That is playing with fire—because if the markets believe we are not going to pay our debt, it could be a formula for recession or worse."

In the tea party wing of the Grand Old Party, that warning may not mean squat, but John Boehner certainly understands its reality. The question in his mind must be how much will Democrats surrender this time out of fear the Republicans might actually be myopic enough to pull the plug on government borrowing and spark an economic crash that, unlike the Great Recession, would be hell for them and their wealthy benefactors. What the Speaker said in Stamford should be remembered. He didn't really intend to shut the government down. And he doesn't really intend to let the government default. It's a bluff. Could the Democratic leadership please not fall for it again?