When it comes to legislative sagas, the annual ritual of increasing the U.S. debt limit is the equivalent of a nuclear standoff. Every sane lawmaker agrees that not raising the Treasury's authority to finance the national debt would lead to a U.S. default — and a fallout that could tank global financial markets and risk a recession.

In reality, these debt-limit showdowns have created the opposite effect of mutual assured destruction. Back then, U.S. and Soviet leaders knew the easiest answer was to do nothing — not firing the missiles avoided nuclear holocaust.

On Capitol Hill, that's not an option. Lawmakers must affirmatively cast a risky political vote or else chance a financial holocaust.

But it's time for Congress to retire one of the most dangerous weapons in its arsenal. Once considered a perfunctory nuisance vote, the debt ceiling has now become the most toxic fiscal vote on Capitol Hill after more than six years of standoffs. Republicans fired the first shots, bringing the nation within hours of default in the summer 2011 showdown with President Barack Obama that ended with $2 trillion in savings.

Now Republicans, with full control of Congress and the White House, face a borrowing deadline on the nation's nearly $20 trillion debt of mid-October, at the latest. Some conservatives are balking at calls from President Trump's advisers to simply increase the limit without spending reforms, and Democrats are happily awaiting the inevitable call from House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) begging for votes.

There's a small but growing collection of lawmakers who want to eliminate the debt vote as a political weapon. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) brought up the idea in an unrelated interview with The Washington Post's Ed O'Keefe, saying the issue has been used by Republicans and allied groups to confuse voters.

"People think that raising the debt ceiling is allowing the government to borrow more money next year. It's not," King said. "In reality, it simply allows the government to pay the bills it's already incurred to fund the spending that's already been voted on."

Origins of the debt showdown

A long shot given the tumultuous political environment, the chance at a bipartisan debt-limit deal might still be possible. Trump campaigned as a populist who wants to protect Social Security and Medicare, not cut it the way Ryan once proposed. That eliminates most of the possible trade-offs that conservatives have demanded in exchange for raising the debt limit.

No president has ever had as much personal experience with debt as the real estate developer now sitting in the Oval Office.

For now, some senior GOP aides want to wrap a "clean" debt increase into a broader, must-pass bill including initial recovery funds for Texas in Harvey's aftermath and a stopgap spending bill to avert a government shutdown.

Leaders of the House Freedom Caucus have resisted that proposal, believing the separate debt vote forces lawmakers to take responsibility for their spending decisions. But the conservative caucus has not offered a proposal that can win passage in the House and Senate, with Trump's support.

If Republicans allow a clean debt increase to pass on their watch, as now seems certain, that should increase their desire for a longer-term deal to avoid future such votes.

King, who caucuses with Democrats, recommended that Congress reinstate a version of the "Gephardt rule." In the late 1970s, Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), the future House minority leader, won approval of a rule that eliminated actual House votes to raise the borrowing limit. Instead, the increase was tucked inside the annual budget resolution, and once that passed, the debt limit was sent to the Senate as a separate bill.

Senators, with their six-year terms, generally had the political courage to approve the must-pass measure, sometimes slightly amending it and requiring the House to actually vote on it. In 2009, fiscally conservative Democrats held out their votes until Obama agreed to create the Bowles-Simpson commission studying the federal debt.

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That relative detente ended with the 2010 midterm elections, when Republicans swept into the House majority and the new speaker, John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), ditched the Gephardt rule. Boehner essentially claimed the debt limit as a hostage, demanding a dollar in spending cuts for every dollar that the borrowing limit was increased.

In early August 2011, within a day or two of fiscal zero hour, Congress passed the Budget Control Act and imposed spending caps that carved out $2 trillion from federal agency budgets over the next decade.

Obama's top advisers believed that many Republicans were reckless enough to actually go into default. But in an interview afterward, McConnell admitted he never intended to "take a chance at shooting" the hostage.

"It's a hostage that's worth ransoming," McConnell told The Post.

From that point on, McConnell began every negotiation by calming the financial markets with a guarantee the debt legislation would pass, which it did with bipartisan majorities.

This fall's debt showdown began in similar fashion. "We will pay our debts and we will make the debt limit," Ryan told CNBC in a late August interview.

Those reassurances have rendered the ensuing few weeks almost pointless. Trump opposes the most far-reaching changes proposed by GOP fiscal hawks, such as Social Security cuts, and Democrats will never agree to conservative legislation that is unrelated to fiscal policy.

"The tool was only effective if that leverage was proportional and rational," said Michael Steel, a senior adviser to Boehner during the 2011 showdown. "A rational person believes you shouldn't increase the debt without cutting the spending that led to the debt. No rational person believed we should threaten to crash the global economy to force President Obama to sign a repeal of Obamacare."

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The longer-term risk is that a different set of congressional leaders will be paralyzed by the politics of the moment and find that doing nothing will be easier than doing something, allowing a default that could be a financial catastrophe.

Fear of backlash has made the debt vote such anathema for House Republicans that fewer than 30 voted for it in 2014. Yet almost all those Republicans privately acknowledge they don't want a default.

McConnell and Ryan can continue to put their members through this politically debilitating exercise every two years, or they can push Trump — the king of real estate debt — to get behind a deal to come up with new Gephardt rule.

Either way, Democrats have grown tired of seeing Republican colleagues at local grant announcements while publicly voting against more federal borrowing.

"You can't be there for the ribbon-cutting at the airport but then not want to pay for the asphalt on the runway," King said.

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