The debt ceiling still looms in the background. And ThinkProgress says the rhetoric is heating up:
A handful of incoming Republican lawmakers — including Sen.-elect Mike Lee (R-UT) and Reps.-elect Jeff Denhem (R-CA) and Tim Scott (R-SC) — have said that they will not vote to increase the debt ceiling, even though the U.S. government will reach its borrowing limit early next year. “I’m going to vote against raising the national debt ceiling. We simply can’t continue to mortgage the future or our unborn children and grandchildren,” Lee said.
Plenty of Republican freshman besides these three also ran on opposition to a debt ceiling increase, and according to Rep.-elect Bill Johnson (R-OH), many of them have agreed to stick to their guns when the vote comes.
At the same time, Republican leadership in the House steps into the role of the "responsible" party that has to deal with reality:
Incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-OH) has been talking to the GOP’s freshmen about the debt ceiling, telling them “we’re going to have to deal with it as adults.” “Whether we like it or not, the federal government has obligations, and we have obligations on our part,” Boehner said.
How to reconcile those two positions? Well, that'll be the test. But it isn't like the GOP doesn't know what it's getting into, or how to play the expectations game. Consider the observation of Slate's David Weigel on Lee's role in the fight:
[S]o far [Lee's] promising do what FreedomWorks and other Tea Party groups hoped he would when they backed him -- using a very safe seat as the high ground to launch Overton Window-shifting attacks on the political consensus.
When held up against the threat of federal default and a government shutdown, what price for the cooperation of Boehner's House troops might not seem reasonable by comparison? They won't want to approve an increase and they won't do it cheaply. But there's some level of payoff at which they can be moved, and the House Republican won't likely be particularly reluctant to find it.
And on the other side, it's a similar but tougher question. What sort of concessions from Senate Democrats might not seem reasonable compared to default?
The Senate will, in theory, have an opportunity to try to set the parameters of the debate and put the onus on the House to either agree, or be the party holding the financial system and the federal government hostage. But that only happens if the Senate is procedurally capable of passing a debt ceiling bill first. And you know what stands in the way of that.