Twelve years ago, Tea Party Republicans took control of the House of Representatives. To gain leverage over President Barack Obama, they vowed to oppose any increase in the debt ceiling that wasn’t paired with significant spending cuts. If Obama and House Republicans hadn’t reached a deal by mid-August, the U.S. would have defaulted on the national debt and triggered a global financial crisis.

On August 2, 2011, with just days to spare, Obama and House Republicans reached a deal to raise the debt ceiling and cut spending by more than a trillion dollars over 10 years. The fiscal drama unnerved Wall Street: The rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded U.S. debt on August 5, and the S&P 500 fell 17 percent between July 29 and August 8.

Now another Republican majority is taking power in the House, and some Republican legislators have signaled their intent to once again use the debt ceiling to force spending cuts. Dylan Matthews at Vox has reported that a “2011 standoff looks unnervingly possible” in 2023, and some pundits are warning of the “Next Debt Ceiling Crisis.”

Breaching the debt ceiling would be disastrous for the economy. Indeed, even the possibility of a debt ceiling crisis could shake market confidence and tip the nation into a recession.

But the experts I spoke to expected 2023 to play out differently from 2011. While many Republicans still talk a big game about fiscal responsibility, the politics of the issue have shifted dramatically. 

Andrew Biggs, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that Republicans face a fundamental tension between their constituency and their ideology. “Republicans are historically the party of small government. But Republicans are increasingly the party of people who benefit from Social Security and Medicare.”

And these programs constitute nearly half of federal spending, so it’s hard to significantly cut the deficit without touching them.

So while Congress will certainly have some heated arguments in the coming months, especially around discretionary programs that have modest price tags but high culture war salience, don’t expect a repeat of the dramatic showdowns we saw 12 years ago. A prolonged government shutdown—to say nothing of another debt ceiling crisis—wouldn’t play to Republicans’ advantage, and Republican leaders know it.

Republicans’ two fiscal factions

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